Add tender.datePublished field

[juanpane]

The problem

Many countries have the information on when the tender was published. We are currently working specifically with Honduras and Paraguay, and both countries have this information available for publishing.

Having this information in a easy way to access it can have many benefits, for instance, to be able to compute some indicators that will say how many days a potential bidder has to prepare an offer (tender.tenderDate.endDate - tender.datePublihsed).

Currenly there is no easy attribute that can be used to publish this information. In the past there was a discussion on how to do this, but the proposed solution is not very straigth forward and is not simple

Proposed solution

The proposal is to create a simple extension with one attribute called tender.datePublished of type date which can then be used by publishers.

[jpmckinney]

Thanks! I've scheduled it for inclusion in OCDS 1.2.0.

[duncandewhurst]

This information is also available in PhilGEPS

[duncandewhurst]

The PhilGEPS data also includes a published date for the award notice.

Other than understanding how timely publication of the award notice was (after the actual date of the award) I am not sure how important it is to have an explicit field for this information over the approaches discussed in #261, but for consistency with tender.datePublished we should consider whether to add award.datePublished

[duncandewhurst]

The Himachal Pradesh Govt Tenders Information System includes a publicationDate field for tenders.

[jpmckinney]

Noting that this extension was published and registered a while ago (CRM-4909): https://extensions.open-contracting.org/en/extensions/tender_datePublished/master/

[duncandewhurst]

The field name (datePublished) and description ("The date when the tender was published.") in the extension seem to be backward-looking only.

Some publishers wish to disclose the expected publication date of the tender, which may still differ from the date from which the tender is open for submissions, e.g. SIF's SOURCE platform includes a 'tender_publication_taget_date` field.

We could instead use publicationDate (which would conform better to the schema style guide) and also improve the description so that it does more than restate the title, e.g.

path	title	description
publicationDate	Publication Date	The date on which the tender notice or documentation is published

[jpmckinney]

The intended date of publication of a notice is captured by futureNoticeDate in the communication extension.

tender.datePublished matches Document.datePublished, Contract.dateSigned, dateModified (Milestone and Document) and Milestone.dateMet, as well as Schema.org.

[duncandewhurst]

Ah, I was not aware of that extension. Bring on #1074.

We should add something to the schema style guide about date fields being an exception to the 'put the qualifier first' rule.

[jpmckinney]

We should add something to the schema style guide about date fields being an exception to the 'put the qualifier first' rule.

Done in above commit.

[Ben-Hickling]

I'm re-opening this thread as requested by the OCDS Helpdesk to note that in the UK we plan to use both tender.datePublished and awards.datePublished, to respectively capture the dates that the tender and award were published. We will create a new extension for the latter if necessary. This will allow this information to be included in tenderUpdate and awardUpdate releases where they wouldn't be otherwise. We need to cater for analysis tools that only hold the latest release for each procurement (so the awardUpdate overwrites the award, for example).

[jpmckinney]

Hi @Ben-Hickling, can you create a new issue? This issue was about adding tender.datePublished, although Duncan did add a comment about an award datePublished. At any rate, they are separate fields, and deserve separate issues.

[Ben-Hickling]

@jpmckinney I've now created #1456 to discuss awards.datePublished.