Open Opportunities at The European Big Data Value Forum

At Open Opportunities, we’re on a mission to improve the global procurement market, valued at an astounding £13 trillion annually. We’re proud to collect, manage, and analyse data from more than 150 countries, helping enhance governments’ procurement processes worldwide through our Open Opportunities platform.

Recently, our founder, Ian Makgill, spoke at the European Big Data Value Forum (EBDVF) 2024 in Budapest. The EBDVF 2024 is organised by the Big Data Value Association (BDVA), in collaboration with AI&AUT EXPO, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Ideal-ist, Neumann Technology Platform and the Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI).

Ian shared valuable insights and his experience managing vast amounts of data, demonstrating how cleansing and enrichment across millions of documents can transform unstructured information into valuable, structured data.

Ian participated in two sessions. The first was on the “Generative AI for Data and Knowledge Engineering” session, in which he presented the topic of “Using Generative AI to improve entity matching”. Ian explained how we’re leveraging advanced AI techniques to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of identifying and matching entities across vast procurement datasets. This application of AI is crucial in making public sector contracts more accessible and easier to navigate through our Open Opportunities platform.

At the “Advancing Data Lifecycle Management: Tools and Strategies for Enhanced Monetisation” session of EBDVF 2024, Ian Makgill spoke about the challenge of using AI in production. At Open Opportunities we’ve been using large language models to enhance our data for over six years. Ian spoke about the perspective of users who access data and AI tools, stressing that we have a duty to ensure that we do this work safely and for their benefit.

If you’re interested in Ian’s ideas, check out his white paper “Using AI: A guide for bid writers”. This resource goes beyond theory, offering actionable knowledge to improve bidding outcomes. It covers the entire bidding cycle, from opportunity identification to final submission, demonstrating how AI can provide advantages at each stage.