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OCDS

Open Contracting Partnership · Open Contracting Data Standard SIGNET support: Normative mapping

What it is

The Open Contracting Data Standard is the international open standard for publishing structured data across the public contracting lifecycle — planning, tender, award, contract, and implementation. Adopted by governments worldwide, it is the reference vocabulary for procurement transparency and the phase model most of the field now thinks in.

The standard is maintained by the Open Contracting Partnership. Official reference →

How SIGNET supports it

OCDS sits in SIGNET's normative mapping tier, and its role is foundational: it provides the lifecycle. SIGNET's process layer adopts the five OCDS stages as its canonical phase model, and the mapping table binds the objects stage by stage — Need to OCDS planning, SourcingEvent and Lot to tender, Submission to the OCDS bid extension, Award to award, Contract to contract, and Party to the OCDS organisation model. A conforming implementation MUST be able to project any SIGNET process down to a conforming OCDS release and lift OCDS data into the canonical model.

The projection is designed to be clean. Where a canonical object has no OCDS counterpart — most importantly the entire Agent Layer of synthetic agents, mandates, and decisions — the projection omits it without error. A public body can meet its OCDS publication obligations from a SIGNET network without the SIGNET-original structures ever entangling the published release.

SIGNET also adopts OCDS's most successful adoption decision: low-friction, plain-JSON consumption. The canonical serialisation is JSON-LD, but it remains ordinary JSON to consumers that ignore the semantics — the same property that made OCDS practical at global scale.

Where it lives in the standard