Building and Validating an Ontology for Public Procurement: The Case of Cameroon

Public procurement or tendering generally refers to the process followed by public authorities for the purchase of goods and services. In this process, the publication of tender notices online has become an essential and mandatory step in many countries, including in Cameroon. However, this step produces a huge amount of data, which makes the search for information tedious. Several solutions have been explored to overcome this problem, including the use of the semantic web, which allows web resources to be understood by machines. This paper presents the APCO ontology, a public procurement ontology that semantically describes the publication stage of the public procurement process. We use the APCO ontology to generate a knowledge graph for Cameroonian public procurement that will facilitate information retrieval and data analysis in Cameroonian public procurement.