  Public Procurement refers to governments' purchasing activities of goods,
services, and construction of public works. In the European Union (EU), it is
an essential sector, corresponding to 15% of the GDP. EU public procurement
generates large amounts of data, because award notices related to contracts
exceeding a predefined threshold must be published on the TED (EU's official
journal). Under the framework of the DeCoMaP project, which aims at leveraging
such data in order to predict fraud in public procurement, we constitute the
FOPPA (French Open Public Procurement Award notices) database. It contains the
description of 1,380,965 lots obtained from the TED, covering the 2010--2020
period for France. We detect a number of substantial issues in these data, and
propose a set of automated and semi-automated methods to solve them and produce
a usable database. It can be leveraged to study public procurement in an
academic setting, but also to facilitate the monitoring of public policies, and
to improve the quality of the data offered to buyers and suppliers.
