Nice work! I hear about these challenges in collaborating on research all the time. Developing a platform like this is a significant investment for most teams, and for many, the development and maintenance is a distraction from their mission. The company I work for, Domino Data Lab, has a language/ algorithm-agnostic platform that solves for this. We have a trial for teams who want to take a look and offer a free subscription for academic institutions.
Yes, but they are not efficient: When updating one small field, like string, which is larger than the original one, the whole document must be resized too, to have enough space for the updated field. This is inconvenient.
I'd love to know as well. There's a lot of great data on doctors in the US at data.cms.gov and data.medicare.gov. Socrata, the company I work for, builds and hosts the APIs so let me know if I can help in any way!
And for those companies providing services (i.e. people doing work, rather than just SaaS) there's a lot of subcontracting that doesn't show up in this data.
I don't know much about this new explorer tool, but it's based off of USASpending.gov which is a bit fickle...which is to be expected given the messiness of the data involved (companies have varied names, subsidiaries etc., among other real-life complexities).
But you can do an "advanced search" by registered company name, and this is what comes up for "Microsoft" -- probably doesn't include all of its subsidiaries that don't have "Microsoft" in the name: ~$1.4 billion in awarded contracts
You really have to have a groomed database to get reasonably accurate data. At a former employer (federal market research) we maintained a separate database of contractors mapping the relationship between companies based on DUNS number, which enabled rolling up totals for subsidiaries. Of course that doesn't account for JVs or subcontracting.
Government requires competition for purchases. So vendors like Dell, SHI, CDW, Carahsoft, etc are all wholesalers who compete over the pennies for fulfillment to sell Microsoft (and most other) software.
1. Agencies often buy from distributors and integrators, not publishers. In this case, original manufacturers may appear in the variable `descriptionofcontractrequirement`.
2. Spelling may differ. Variable `dunsnumber` is be a better indicator for uniqueness.
Consider checking out US Dept of Commerce's Census of Governments - it has a lot of information. There's also a big trend of state/local governments opening their budgets and expenditures to the public in new and engaging ways. Some examples:
