RED FLAGS Documentation

Table of contents

Every section assume you read the previous ones including this page with general information below.

Chapters of the user documentation

The user documentation lists the steps you should take to use the website's functions, such as browsing and searching information.

Chapters of the maintainer documentation

The maintainer documentation tells everything you need to know to install, run and manage the Red Flags system.

Chapters of the developer documentation

The developer documentation goes deep into the architecture of the Red Flags software, explains how it works and helps you extend it.

About the project

The Red Flags project aims to enhance the transparency of public procurements in Hungary and support the fight against corrupt procurements. It provides an interactive tool that allows the monitoring of procurement processes and their implementation by citizens, journalists or even public officials and catch fraud risks at different stages of the procurement process. The Red Flags tool automatically checks procurement documents from the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) and filters risky procurements through a special algorithm. Although risky does not mean corrupt, flagged procurement documents are worth checking. Users can subscribe to receive alerts if risky procurements are published (generally or in their special field of interest).

The Red Flags is a common project of K-Monitor, PetaByte and Transparency International Hungary, with the support of the European Commission. The views expressed on the website do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

European Commission
With the financial support of the Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme
European Commission - Directorate-General Home Affairs

Read the project summary

Technical overview

What it does

Downloads data - Runs through the notices available on TED and downloads them.

Processes data - Parses the raw input, creates a model, analyzes it with indicators to generate flags.

Stores data - Stores the parsed and generated information to be available for further operations.

Serves data - Sends subscription emails and displays stored data on the website.

The whole process (downloading, processing, storing fresh notices, sending subscriptions and updating the website) is done once every day.

About the input data

The data into Red Flags is coming from TED. The documents of public procurements are called notices, they have a Data tab with a metadata table and they have the document tab which contains the details of the procurement in text blocks. Most of the information is only available in the original language of the tender.

We spent a lot of time analyzing these documents and testing our parser manually and we can say that the input data itself can contain errors.

Also, because most of the data must be parsed from not well-formatted text paragraphs, the parsing is quite difficult. We are using as many search and exclude patterns as we can, but there can be some places where our parser can fail to give correct output.

Because of these experiences, we recommend you to check the original document too on TED, the website shows a button on every notice page.

License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The source code is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.

Copyright © 2016, PetaByte Research Ltd.

Contact

In case you find a mistake or you have any questions, you can contact us here:

info @ redflags . eu