Which tender notice is the official source?

Identity

Prove which procurement and notice you are looking at

A title is a search clue, not an identity. “Cloud migration services” could describe several procurements by the same ministry, several lots inside one procedure or a planning notice followed by a live competition. Aggregators often shorten titles to fit cards. Buyer pages may use a programme name that never appears in the formal publication. Start a candidate table before deciding which page is official. Copy the title as shown, buyer name, notice type, publication date, deadline as displayed, lot, local reference, URL and retrieval time from every page. Do not harmonize the spelling yet. Differences are evidence.

Then recover formal identifiers. A notice identifier names one publication object. A notice version distinguishes editorial versions of that notice. A procedure identifier connects publications that belong to the procurement process. A buyer reference or solicitation number may be the operating key used in the document portal. Lot and part identifiers narrow the scope. These values are not interchangeable. TED’s eForms documentation, for example, gives a notice its own identifier and version while using a globally unique procedure identifier for most non-planning notices. UK Find a Tender links notices across a procurement with an Open Contracting Identifier. SAM.gov exposes both a notice ID and solicitation number. Preserve the scheme and publisher beside every value.

Identity needs more than one matching field. Require a strong identifier match or an explicit official cross-reference, then confirm the contracting authority and the relevant lot or part. If identifiers are absent, use a bundle of buyer, exact reference, scope, place, dates and official links, but keep the state provisional. A shared title and deadline do not prove identity. Neither does a copied description. Stop if one page belongs to a framework and another to a call-off, if lots differ materially, or if the supposed duplicate is a later replacement procedure. Those questions need their own lineage or deduplication decision.

Roles

Classify what each source is authorized to do

Ownership, authorization and function answer different questions. A contracting authority may publish a useful project page on its own domain. That proves the buyer controls the page, but the page may still be a summary that points to a formal notice elsewhere. A commercial company may operate the e-procurement service selected by the buyer. The domain is private, yet the procurement record or document room can be an officially designated operational source. Another commercial site may crawl the same notice without any buyer relationship. Labels such as government, partner or official are too coarse to distinguish these cases.

Verify the operator through the service’s about, legal or documentation pages. Verify the publication role through applicable official guidance and the record itself. Verify designation by following a link or instruction from the statutory notice or buyer-issued material, not from the candidate site’s own claim. Record the exact relationship: “notice published in the Official Journal,” “documents available at the address named in the notice,” “buyer information page links to the competition,” or “secondary index reproduces selected fields.” A search engine cache and an aggregator snippet stay discovery evidence even if every copied value is accurate.

Official data needs its own class. XML, JSON, PDF and HTML can be representations of one published notice. They may differ in usability without differing in publisher. The TED Open Data documentation identifies several official formats. UK Find a Tender publishes OCDS release packages. But a machine endpoint can have a narrower time or version scope than the human service. The SAM.gov public opportunities API states that it supplies the latest active version and directs users to Data Services for all versions. Before an agent treats an API response as complete history, record what the endpoint includes, excludes and updates.

Lineage

Follow identifier links instead of flattening the notice history

One procedure can legitimately produce many official notices. Planning, competition, change, cancellation, result, modification and contract records answer different questions. A shared procedure identifier can show that they belong together without saying that they are equivalent. The TED eForms FAQ explains that most notices in a procedure share a procedure identifier, while specific relationships use explicit fields. A change notice references the notice it changes. Planning notices can require a separate previous-planning reference because they do not carry the normal procedure identifier. The source-authority record should preserve those edges.

Build a small graph, even if the working output is a table. Give every observed publication its own row. Connect rows only with a published identifier, an explicit previous or changed-notice reference, a related-process field, or a buyer-issued cross-reference. Label the edge: same procedure, changes, replaces, follows planning, establishes framework, call-off under framework, or unrelated candidate. Do not manufacture the edge from title similarity. A procedure identifier is not enough to decide which notice supplies today’s deadline, and a later publication date is not enough to prove replacement.

Preserve old records. TED’s search help says its latest-version filter hides older versions from search results while those older publications remain available. An agent that keeps only the visible search result loses the evidence required to explain a change. Conversely, do not mark the newest linked notice as the active competition merely because it is newest. It might be a result or modification. Record notice type, version, publication time and relationship first. Verification of the latest amendment, cancellation or open status belongs in the dedicated review after authority is resolved.

Authority

Assign a controlling source to each fact you intend to use

Asking which website wins is often the wrong test. In an EU procurement above the applicable threshold, the electronically signed notice published in the Official Journal Supplement is the authentic public notice. That notice can name an internet address where procurement documents are accessible. The designated document portal then becomes the direct source for the files available there, while the Official Journal remains the publication source for its notice. In the current UK regime, official guidance names Find a Tender as the central digital platform for notices and allows later posting elsewhere. A buyer can still direct bidders to another system for an operational step. The relationship has two authoritative nodes with different jobs.

Define the fact before choosing its source. For “this notice was published,” cite the authorized publication service and publication identifier. For “these were the documents available at 14:10 UTC,” cite the designated document portal, file list and retrieval time. For “questions must be submitted here,” cite the current buyer instruction that designates the channel. For “the opportunity is open,” run a separate current-state check across the official notice and designated portal. Do not carry an authority decision from one fact into another by habit.

If official sources disagree, the classification is still useful but the fact remains unresolved. Record both values, sources and observation times. Check whether one value belongs to another lot, notice type or version. Check for an explicit change or replacement link. Then route the issue to the relevant review: open status, deadline reconciliation, amendment control, document precedence or authorized clarification. Do not let a source-authority record decide a legal hierarchy that the sources themselves do not establish.

Record

Keep one working record without erasing the source chain

The finished work product is one source-authority record for the procurement. It contains the candidate set, identity decision, source classifications, notice lineage, fact assignments, conflicts and access limits. It also names one canonical working link: the stable public page a new reviewer should open first to recover this procedure in its present jurisdiction. This is a practical choice, not a declaration that the page controls every fact. Add the clean notice identifier and a recovery query so the record survives a changed route.

Keep companion official links beside it. At minimum, preserve the authentic or central notice publication and the buyer-designated operational portal when both exist. Add the official machine representation if an agent will consume it. Preserve the aggregator URL in a discovery field with the time it was observed. This allows the team to measure discovery quality and investigate mismatches without citing the aggregator as authority. Never replace the original URL with a tracking redirect or copy an authenticated session address into the record.

Each fact assignment needs a short reason. “Official” is insufficient. Write “Find a Tender is the central digital platform named by the applicable UK guidance; this record carries notice ID X and OCID Y” or “the signed OJ S publication authenticates this notice; its document-access field designates portal Z.” Quote the decisive field where possible. Add the retrieval time, source language and transformation, including translation or API mapping. A reviewer should be able to reproduce the classification without trusting the analyst’s reputation.

Limits

Keep conflicts and inaccessible official sources visible

An official label does not guarantee that a source is reachable, complete or current at the moment of research. A portal may require supplier registration, expose documents only after acceptance of terms, or suffer an outage. A journal may link to an external service it does not control. A public API may omit archived versions. Record the attempted URL, response, timestamp and stated access requirement. “Access-limited” is a finding. It is not permission to bypass controls or to promote the nearest copied value.

Use the aggregator as a lead while the primary source is unavailable. Its value can be stored as “secondary, unconfirmed,” with its retrieval time and the official identifier it claims. It cannot become the working deadline, submission channel or eligibility rule merely because the official site failed. Try the official identifier search, another official format, the public journal record or a clean browser session. If access lawfully requires an account, route that task to an authorized user. Do not create an account, accept conditions or expose credentials on an agent’s initiative.

Conflicting official pages need a named next question. Is one page about another lot? Is a date a publication date rather than receipt deadline? Does a change notice point to the earlier publication? Is the buyer page an old announcement? Preserve both values until that question is answered. If the conflict affects participation, price, compliance or submission, stop downstream use. This article establishes source roles. It does not resolve the current status, reconcile two deadlines or interpret which clause has legal precedence.

• Never bypass authentication, paywalls, robots controls or document restrictions.
• Never let a successful cached copy masquerade as the current official page.
• Never overwrite a conflicting value before its scope and timestamp are recorded.
• Never send a buyer question without the authorized channel and human approval.
• Never infer legal authority from a national domain suffix or public-sector logo.

Agents

Give an agent evidence rules, stop conditions and a typed output

An agent can perform much of the public research if the assignment asks for a record rather than “the right link.” Supply the candidate URLs and the fact that needs support. Require exact identifiers, operators, source roles, clean URLs, quotes and retrieval times. Tell the agent to retain every candidate and distinguish observation from conclusion. The result should be a typed record whose unresolved fields are explicit. A confident paragraph without the identifier chain is a failed result, even when its chosen link later proves correct.

The agent may search official services, use documented public APIs, follow links from official notices, compare buyer and lot identities, and retrieve public representations. It may propose a canonical working link and fact-specific authority assignments. It must stop when jurisdiction is unclear, identifiers point to different scopes, the official relationship is self-asserted rather than evidenced, access requires credentials, or official values conflict. It must not call, email, register, accept portal terms, submit information or make a legal conclusion.

Make the output easy for another system to inspect. Use stable field names, preserve original-language values, include null rather than invented data and attach evidence to each classification. Separate `observed_value` from `accepted_value`. Separate `source_role` from `authority_for`. Record `coverage_limit` for APIs and transformed datasets. Those distinctions let later agents verify current status, resolve deadlines and track amendments without repeating the identity research or inheriting an unsupported assumption.

Example

A worked decision can end with more than one official source

A fictional supplier finds “Passenger information platform” on a tender aggregator. The card names Northbridge Transit Authority, shows 18 October as the deadline and links through a tracking redirect. A buyer news page announces the project and says responses are due on 16 October. An Official Journal notice has a publication number, notice identifier and procedure identifier. Its procurement-document field links to a national e-procurement portal, where the buyer reference is NTA/ICT/26/17 and the competition is divided into two lots.

The identifiers show that the Official Journal notice and portal record belong to the same procedure. The buyer page carries the same local reference but links to the journal publication. The aggregator reproduces the buyer reference and title but supplies no source-role evidence. The record classifies the journal as the authentic notice publication, the e-procurement portal as the designated document source, the buyer page as official context and the aggregator as discovery. It selects the clean journal landing page as the canonical recovery link and keeps the document portal as a companion official link.

The two displayed deadlines are not reconciled here. The source-authority record states that 18 October was observed on the aggregator and 16 October on the buyer page, while the relevant official notice and lot portal fields still need a precise current-state review. No deadline enters the bid calendar. The next action goes to the deadline discrepancy workflow with the notice, procedure, buyer and lot identifiers already resolved. This is a successful outcome: the source structure is proved, and the unresolved operational fact remains visible.