Organization references

Many parties can be involved in the lifecycle of a contracting process. Sometimes the same party can have multiple roles. For example, an organization can first be a tenderer and then become a supplier.

To avoid data repetition, OCDS 1.1 introduced a top-level parties array, where the detailed information about all the organizations and other participants involved in a particular contracting process is declared.

When a reference is needed to an entry in the parties array, e.g. to provide a link between a tenderer declared in the tender section and its organization details, use an OrganizationReference object. This object includes just the name and id of the organization, instead of repeating all its relevant data again.

Worked Example

In the example below:

• An Organization is declared in the parties array with the id GB-COH-09506232 and name Open Data Services. Information related to its legal identifier and contactPoint is also disclosed here.

• An OrganizationReference object is used in the tenderers and suppliers array to reference Open Data Services, without duplicating the organization's detailed information.

• If a user looks at the tenderers block and wants to contact Open Data Services, then the user has to search for the id GB-COH-09506232 in the parties array.

• The same needs to be applied to each OrganizationReference instance.

{
    "uri": "https://standard.open-contracting.org/examples/releases/ocds-213czf-000-00001-04-award.json",
    "publishedDate": "2010-05-10T09:30:00Z",
    "publisher": {
        "scheme": "GB-COH",
        "uid": "09506232",
        "name": "Open Data Services Co-operative Limited",
        "uri": "https://standard.open-contracting.org/examples/"
    },
    "license": "http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/",
    "publicationPolicy": "https://github.com/open-contracting/sample-data/",
    "version": "1.1",
    "extensions": [],
    "releases": [
        {
            "ocid": "ocds-213czf-000-00001",
            "id": "ocds-213czf-000-00001-04-award",
            "date": "2010-05-10T09:30:00Z",
            "language": "en",
            "tag": [
                "award"
            ],
            "initiationType": "tender",
            "parties": [
                {
                    "identifier": {
                        "scheme": "GB-COH",
                        "id": "09506232",
                        "legalName": "Open Data Services"
                    },
                    "name": "Open Data Services",
                    "contactPoint": {
                        "name": "Procurement Team",
                        "email": "contact@opendataservices.coop",
                        "url": "https://opendataservices.coop/"
                    },
                    "roles": [
                        "tenderer",
                        "supplier"
                    ],
                    "id": "GB-COH-09506232"
                }
            ],
            "tender": {
                "id": "ocds-213czf-000-00001-01-tender",
                "title": "Open Data publication improvements",
                "status": "active",
                "tenderers": [
                    {
                        "id": "GB-COH-09506232",
                        "name": "Open Data Services"
                    }
                ]
            },
            "awards": [
                {
                    "id": "ocds-213czf-000-00001-award-01",
                    "title": "Award of contract to improve open data publications.",
                    "status": "pending",
                    "date": "2010-05-10T09:30:00Z",
                    "value": {
                        "amount": 11000000,
                        "currency": "GBP"
                    },
                    "suppliers": [
                        {
                            "id": "GB-COH-09506232",
                            "name": "Open Data Services"
                        }
                    ],
                    "contractPeriod": {
                        "startDate": "2010-07-01T00:00:00Z",
                        "endDate": "2011-08-01T23:59:00Z"
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}