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open-contracting-extensions / european-union

OCDS for the European Union
http://standard.open-contracting.org/profiles/eu/latest/en/
Apache License 2.0
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Non-unique "Contract No" causes data issues #93

Closed jpmckinney closed 1 year ago

jpmckinney commented 3 years ago

In contract award notices, Contract No (/AWARD_CONTRACT/CONTRACT_NO) is mapped to OCDS' awards.id, contracts.id and contracts.awardID. However, if the Contract No is not unique within the contracting process, then if there are many awards:

  1. It will be impossible, in OCDS, to relate a contract to an award, since a contract's awardID will match many awards' id.
  2. The merge routine will merge all awards with the same id into a single object. (Same for contracts.)

An option is to treat the Contract No as not being set, in which case the instructions in the profile are to:

let Contract No be the notice number followed by a hyphen '-' followed by the value of the ITEM attribute of the AWARD_CONTRACT element

However, similar to the warning in the guidance for F20, this would make it difficult or impossible to update the award or contract using a F20 Modification Notice. That is because F20 uses the Contract No to identify the award and contract. With respect to the option above, F20 has the notice number of the contract award notice in /PROCEDURE/NOTICE_NUMBER_OJ, but it doesn't have the value of the ITEM attribute of the AWARD_CONTRACT element. That said, if the contract award notice has a single AWARD_CONTRACT element, and the first ITEM attribute has a predictable value, then the award id can be determined.

Using this option, if the award id cannot be determined, then F20 will end up creating new awards and contracts in the OCDS data, rather than updating existing awards and contracts.

All this said, if Contract No is not unique, then using this option will improve the quality of the data.

For (2) only, OCDS Merge has options to override this behavior. However, users expect the default routine to work and are unlikely to use (or know about) this workaround.

jpmckinney commented 3 years ago

If we encounter more mapping considerations arising from data quality issues, we can add a page to the profile itself and move this content there.

jpmckinney commented 1 year ago

An "attention" marker was added to the mapping.

No further work is anticipated, so closing.