Public Sector, new approaches for old problems

Archive of old documents

Exploring possible use case scenarios for Multisensor’s research results

For the last 30 years, there has been a “stand-still” problem in the Public Sector with regards to documentation:

  • Most documents in platforms are still 100% narrative.
  • “Structured” documents still contain a lot of narrative/non-structured information elements.
  • The current controlled vocabularies are insufficient.
  • New “modes/channels” are starting to be used.

Re-using Language Technologies (LT) as a result of the research applied in the MULTISENSOR project can help to break this “stand-still inertia” within this context. For instance, in the “e-Procurement” business sector, a possible real-live application of LT could look like this:

  1. For existing sources of narrative multimodal information: Extract data from the sources and structure it based on current e-Procurement standard vocabularies (e.g. OASIS UBL).
  2. For new document drafting: Help the user in writing structured documents, by supporting the use of narrative information that can be easily (i.e. automatically) transformed into structured data (e.g. special Procurement document drafting assistants).
  3. E-Procurement Use Cases: Use the structured data in combination with knowledge/intelligent artefacts to generate added value services (e.g. matching offer and demand. Need for new artefacts: Terminologies, Ontologies, Landscapes, other).

Following this approach, the idea would be to build a “Public Innovation e-Procurement platform (PleP)” pilot based on LT technologies in order to explore its possible re-usability in the Public Sector.
The PIeP essentials could be

  1. capturing,
  2. structuring and
  3. analysing data,

most of them generated during the public procurement activity, published in different formats and EU languages.

Elements of the Public Innovation eProcurement Plattform (PIeP)

Elements of the Public Innovation eProcurement Plattform (PIeP)


The amount of information generated in the public procurement allows the design of a platform with an ambitious functional scope. Its implementation could be limited to a pilot focusing on the automatic and intelligent combination of supply and demand, as a higher value-added service for system agents and a basis for the development of downstream services. The following diagram shows the possible services that it could offer:

Where the process automation takes place

Where the process automation takes place



From an architecture point of view, the possible elements of each layer of the PleP are shown below (with the LT embedded within “Modules”):

Alt Text

Alt Text




The workflow of the e-Procurement use case shows how all the components from the platform could match together, discovering several business opportunities in other contexts within the Public Sector.

Caption here

Caption here



If you are interested on further opportunities for other Public Sector business sectors, stay up-to-date on the projects results on https://mklab.iti.gr/multisensorproject/.


Photo Credit:

  • Picture “Archives” by Merlin1487 on Flickr – Licenced under creative commons