Criteria

Basic aspects

The ESPD-EDM defined a flexible structure to express data about criteria. Based on this structure UBL-2.3 defined in turn the component cac:TenderingCriterion, which is used in the ESPD-EDM to implement the XML objects for exclusion and selection criteria. The ESPD-EDM 'criterion' entity is a very flexible and business-agnostic structure. This flexibility provides a convenient way to represent any type of criteria. The counterpart is that the semantics of the criteria needs to be delimited based on codes, identifiers and design rules.

In order to represent this structure, in this very GitHub repository, it is possible to find the Excel/ ODS files containing the Criteria Data Structures ESPD. We could say that the 'data structures' described in the spread-sheets define a kind of 'meta-language' (or 'controlled vocabulary') that helps 'map' the structure of an ESPD-EDM criterion and the UBL-2.3 criterion data structure.

For more details please see the “Technical Handbook”. Specifically, section 3.6 Data Structures

General Behaviour

• One criterion may have descendent 'sub-criteria'. This is very useful to, for example, define national exclusion criteria that specialise the EU criteria defined in the Directive. *One criterion may refer to one or several pieces of legislation (EU, national, other).
• One criterion must always contain at least one group of 'properties'. Properties may be informative captions; general requirements issued by the Member State or procedure-specific requirements specified by the contracting authority; and questions addressed to the economic operator.
• One group of properties must always specify at least one 'property'.
• One group of properties may contain one or several 'sub-groups' of properties.

For more information about the Criterion properties, refer to the 3.3 Groups of properties section of the Technical Handbook.

Legislation

In order to point at the related legislation of the Criterion the ESPD-EDM uses the following components of the UBL cac:Legislation:

• cbc:Title.
• cbc:Description.
• cbc:Jurisdiction level.
• cbc:Article.
• cbc:URL.

For more information about the matter and to check some examples, please check the 3.2 Legislation of the online documentation.

GUI control elements

The ESPD-EDM specification includes two sets of data elements (codes) that help software applications control how to show the Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) dealing with ESPD Documents. These elements can be seen as ''processing instructions''. For a comprehensive description of them, refer to the 3.8 GUI control elements of the Technical Handbook.