Questions and Answers – Workshop for reusers of TED data
20 May 2026
These are the revised Questions and Answers, i.e. replies to questions posted before and during the workshop have been reviewed and may have been regrouped or modified for this written version to allow for a more cohesive and complete response.
Please note that some answers may no longer be accurate, as the Publications Office has followed up on comments made and may have modified its approach accordingly. The recordings of the workshop and the slides of the presentations are available in the “Agenda” tab.
The recordings of the workshop and the presentations are available in the “Agenda” tab.
eForms
We use NoticePublicationID (notice number), ContractFolderID (Procedure identifier) and NoticeDocumentReference (Previous notice), which sometimes links 2 sets of related notices. Is that correct?
Answer: In principle, the information in the notice allows to link correctly to related notices. However, there are data quality issues. For example, some buyers might have mistakenly used the same procedure identifier for unrelated notices. Our intention is to use the future dynamic rules in SDK2 to reduce the number of errors but we cannot control that the procurement ID is always used correctly.
Why would a procurement’s estimated value ever be recorded as a negative number? Shouldn’t it always be positive?
Answer: Indeed, it doesn’t make sense for an estimated value to be negative. We will add rules in SDK 1.15 to remove this possibility but while the older SDK versions are still active, you’ll have to continue to handle these edge cases.
We have no idea why buyers have provided negative estimated values but thankfully it has only happened for a handful of cases until now.
See https://code.europa.eu/eproc/eforms/crs/-/work_items/219 for more details about negative amounts, which other fields are affected, and some figures about how often they occur.
Can a group of Lots have several awards, or shall we consider it a single award entity? A single award entity fits into our conceptualization of a lot, which should only have one price.
Answer: Even if lots are part of a group of lots, there will still be a result for each lot.
Tenderers may decide to submit an offer for the group or for the lots individually. As a consequence, a LotTender submitted for a Group of Lots is to be considered for all lots it contains. With groups of lots there may be some strange edge cases where award and rank may not be related. The tender for a group (instead of lots taken individually) is either a winning one (for all the lots of the group) or a non-winning one (for any lot of the group).
Are you planning to enforce the undisclosed fields in the eForms strictly, so that contracting authorities would be required to select at least one value (e.g., Yes/No) rather than leaving them blank?
Answer: The use of undisclosed fields is optional (and currently is rarely used) so if there is no undisclosed data in the notice, the related information (e.g. reason for non-publication) will simply not exist in the notice – so there is no explicit “no”.
When removing duplicate records for below-threshold utility tenders, should we rely on the specific eForms notice subtypes to identify them? Or can we assume that all tenders from utility buyers automatically fall under the utility threshold as defined in the directive?
Answer: There are rules to ensure consistency between the notice subtypes and legal basis. Below-threshold notices should use subtypes E2, E3, E4 but we don’t control if buyers might also use the notice subtypes of their usual directives.
Notices on TED
Is it intentional for multiple corrections of the same previous notice to appear in a single issue of the OJ S? (Example: Notices 329669-2026 and 327295-2026 both correct 303036-2026 on the same day.)
Answer: Normally, a change notice should only change one published notice, but we don’t check if there are multiple changes on the same day, which we agree is confusing. We’ll see if we could implement a dynamic to limit this, but this won’t happen in the near future.
When a 'change notice' is published, does the XML structure contain the complete and updated 'latest ground truth' that entirely overwrites the previous notice?
Answer: Yes, the change notice should contain the latest consolidated information as a full notice.
If a tender has multiple Contract Awards and only one receives a change notice, what is the best practice for re-users to reconcile the latest changed notice with the remaining unchanged ones?
Answer: The buyer might choose to have multiple Contract Award notices, for example, because different lots are awarded at different dates. In principle, the buyer should then continue to change the CANs in the same way, for example, a CAN for each lot, but there are no guarantees that they will provide a consistent tree of changed CANs. Ideally, buyers would always change the latest version of a CAN so the situation is more transparent and less prone to errors.
Could you specify at what time of day new notices are published and become available for retrieval via the TED Search API?
Answer: New notices on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) are published once per day on business days, from Monday to Friday, no later than 9:00 CET/CEST. The publication dates are available at https://ted.europa.eu/en/release-calendar and the publication schedule (also including XML packages) is shown on https://ted.europa.eu/en/help/data-reuse.
TED Open data service
what is the API rate limit for the Open Data Service? Can the SPARQL query provide the data for a specific notice and its lots (buyer, winner, payable amount)?
Answer: We currently don’t have a rate limit for the open data service. Yes, the SPARQL can retrieve notice data like buyer, winner and tender value (cbc:PayableAmount).
How different are the XML schema between SDK versions? If they are different, are these published somewhere so that we can track them more easily?
Answer: You can keep up with SDK releases at https://github.com/OP-TED/eForms-SDK/ and we mention schema changes in the release notes, e.g. https://github.com/OP-TED/eForms-SDK/releases/tag/1.13.0 The SDK Explorer can also help you to identify changes between SDK versions https://docs.ted.europa.eu/eforms-sdk-explorer/
What is the typical time delay before newly published notices become available in the TED Open Data Service? At present, today’s notices are not yet retrievable, and the count of yesterday’s notices appears incomplete.
Answer: Notices published in the OJS on TED are transformed every night, so they are available in the Open Data Service the next morning. The are some notices that are not transformed, and we are working to include them; this concerns the notices in SDK 1.14, which are not yet handled, as well as some specific edge cases.
You can also consult the docs pages on data availability https://docs.ted.europa.eu/ODS/latest/data_availability.html and known issues and limitations https://docs.ted.europa.eu/ODS/latest/querying/known_issues.html
Where can we find the available "building blocks" that we can use in our queries? are they listed somewhere all together?
Answer: The Open Data Service at https://data.ted.europa.eu/ has an “Explore” tab that contains a library of around 35 example queries. They can help you to get started with SPARQL and allow you see how to retrieve data like notice counts and information on buyers, winners and contracts.