Databook

This update outlines a seven-phase plan to improve how software licenses and contracts are matched within the platform. The planned enhancements will introduce better purchase classification, capability tagging, a machine-readable catalog, and price context, helping users more accurately identify and analyze government software spend.

Added new data seeds identifying open-source software alternatives for major city IT contracts, such as Nextcloud for Box and CKAN for Socrata. The update also introduces a classification system for procurement spend to help identify cost-saving opportunities in cloud infrastructure, hosting, and software licensing.

Introduced new curated product summaries for agency software licenses, starting with Microsoft. This update helps users easily understand the purpose and scope of different software products used by the city.

This update adds curated, hand-written product summaries to the platform's licensing data, starting with a detailed summary for Microsoft contracts. The public interface has also been updated to clarify that these curated summaries are hand-written and fully verifiable against recorded contract data.

This update improves the vendor profile pages by explicitly displaying "Not described" when a software contract's text is too vague to summarize, rather than leaving a blank space. Additionally, three generic contract categories were correctly reclassified as unidentified items rather than being mislabeled as specific software products.

This update adds AI-generated product summaries and replaceability ratings to the license analysis pages, helping users understand what each software product does and how easily it can be substituted. Additionally, public vendor profiles now display a list of the software products they license, linking directly to these detailed product family pages.