About OCDS

The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) exists to formalize how contracting data and documents can be published in an accessible, structured and repeatable way.

Governments around the world spend an estimated US$9.5 trillion through contracts every year. Yet, contracting information is often unavailable for public scrutiny. OCDS works to change that.

Check and Review

This tool helps you to:

  • Check that your OCDS data complies with the schema
  • Inspect key contents of your data to review data quality
  • Access your data in different formats (spreadsheet and JSON) to support further review.

Using the data review tool

You can upload, paste or provide a link to data published using the Open Contracting Data Standard. This can be:

Supported encodings are UTF-8 for JSON and UTF-8, Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 for CSV.

The application works with both 'release' and 'record' OCDS documents that conform to the Open Data Contracting Standard

If your data passes basic structural checks, the tool will then present a report on data quality, and information about the contents of your file. It will also offer alternative copies of the data for download.

Data is stored for 90 days at a randomly generated URL. You can share this link with others to support discussion of data quality.

To preview how the data review tool works, try loading some sample data.

More Information click to see.

What happens to the data I provide to this site?

We retain the data you upload or paste to this site, on our server, for 90 days.

If you supply a link, we fetch the data from that link and store it on our server for 90 days.

We delete all data older than 90 days from our servers daily, retaining none of the original data.

While the data is on our servers we may access that data to help us understand how people are using this application, what types of data are being supplied, what common errors exist and so on.

We may also retain data in backups of our servers, which means on occasion, some data may be retained longer. We have no intention of using this data for anything other than server recovery in an emergency.

We do retain some metadata about data supplied to this site. Details can be found in the code, but may include information about whether or not the file was uploaded, linked or pasted, the size of the file, the date/time it was supplied and so on.

Why do you delete data after 90 days?

This is service to allow people to explore machine readable data. As such we see no need to store and gather everything people submit to the site forever. We have chosen 90 days as a practical time frame that allows people to share results with colleagues, but also allows data to disappear over time to save people having to clean up after themselves.

We believe that deleting supplied data after 90 days provides a level of privacy for the users of this service.

Why provide converted versions?

The W3C Data on the Web Best Practices recommend making open data available in a range of formats to meet the needs of different users, for example, developers may want JSON, researchers might prefer a spreadsheet format.

User Tracking

What information does the tool collect about website visitors?

In order to understand who is using the Data Review Tool and how they use it, we collect basic analytics data about users. For more information and to learn how to opt out of this, see the Privacy Notice.

We also collect server logs, which we analyse from time to time to understand traffic to the site. Users cannot opt out of this data collection, and data is treated with respect. For more information, see the Privacy Notice.