Abstract. Public procurement or tendering refers to the process followed by public authorities for the procurement of goods and services. In most developed countries, the law imposes public authorities to provide online information to ensure competitive tendering as far as possible, for which the adequate announcement of tenders is an essential requirement. In addition, transparency laws being proposed in such countries are making the monitoring of public contracts by citizens a fundamental right. This paper describes the PPROC ontology, which has been developed to give support to both processes, publication and accountability, by semantically describing public procurement processes and contracts. The PPROC ontology is extensive, since it covers not only the usual data about the tender, its objectives, deadlines, and awardees, but also details of the whole process, from the initial contract publication to its termination. This makes it possible to use the ontology for both open data publication purposes and for the overall management of the public contract procurement process.

The Web is experiencing a continuous change that is leading to the realization of the Semantic Web. Initiatives such as Linked Data have made a huge amount of structured information publicly available, encouraging the rest of the Internet community to tag their resources with it. Unfortunately, the amount of interlinked domains and information is so big that handling it efficiently has become really difficult for final users. Thus, we have to provide them with tools to search the needed resources in an easy way. In this paper, we propose an approach to provide users with different domain views on a general data repository, enabling them to perform both keyword and refinement searches. Our system exploits the knowledge stored in ontologies to 1) perform efficient keyword searches over a specified domain, and 2) refine the user's domain searches. In this way, we enable the definition of different semantic views on Linked Data datasets without having to change the original semantics. We present a prototype of our approach that focuses on the case of DBpedia, which provides a semantic way to access to Wikipedia.

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