Data
What good tender data looks like
Coverage counts for nothing without deduplication, provenance and honest quality scoring.
By Scott Mendes · 7 July 2026 · 6 min read
Count sources, then check them
Source counts are easy to inflate. A portal that returns a login wall, a page that silently stopped publishing, a feed duplicating another feed — all of them can be listed as sources without contributing a single usable record.
The honest test is per-source: when did it last yield a new notice, how complete were the fields, and how many of those records survived deduplication? A source that fails those checks should be marked inactive, not counted.
Deduplicate across sources, not within them
The same tender is routinely published on a national portal, a regional aggregator and a donor's own site, each with a different reference. Matching on reference alone leaves you with three records and a distorted market size.
Matching needs buyer, title, deadline and value together, with the earliest publication kept as the origin and the others retained as references. Users should see one notice and be able to see where each copy came from.
Keep provenance on every field
Anyone making a commercial decision from procurement data eventually needs to answer: where did this number come from? Storing the source, the original reference and the publication date on every record turns that from a research exercise into a click.
Provenance also makes quality measurable. When a field is missing, you know which source to fix rather than which record to apologise for.
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Scott Mendes
Scott Mendes writes on public procurement, bid strategy and the digital transformation of how governments buy. His analysis draws on the live tender and award records inside TenderMetro Intelligence, across Europe, the Americas and beyond.
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