A Tool For Retrieving The Life-Cycle of Public Procurement Processes

The principle of transparency requires that every act of the public administration should be disclosed publicly to promote citizens trust, accountability, and public integrity. Following this principle, all acts of a Public Procurement (PP) are published sparsely in Official Gazettes in a semi-unstructured format, which makes the task of tracking all acts that compose a PP process difficult for citizens. Regarding this problem, this work presents the PP-Timeline application, a tool used to retrieve the entire life cycle of PP processes. Additionally, this work compares the use of this tool with two different Data Base Management Systems (DBMS), a traditional relational database and a graph database. Also, we performed a load test that evaluates how well the tool handles simultaneous user access. The results showed that the graph database with enabled cache outperforms the relational database by 805% in terms of query execution time, also it handles better the simultaneous user access compared to the relational database. We believe that the design of this application can be used as a baseline for other publicly accessible governmental applications.