State & Local Data Dictionary¶

This document describes the fields available on the SLED API endpoints (/api/sled/opportunities/, /api/sled/forecasts/, and the nested revisions route). For filtering, ordering, and pagination, see the State & Local API Reference.

Overview¶

SLED is state, local and education procurement — solicitations that never appear on SAM.gov because they were never federal. There is no national feed; every jurisdiction publishes on its own portal, and Tango reads them one at a time. One row is one advertised solicitation, arbitrated across every scrape that observed it and keyed by a Tango-minted opportunity_id.

Beta. Coverage is partial and grows by jurisdiction; field availability varies by state. Call /api/sled/opportunities/coverage/ before treating a per-state count as market size.

Note: The full field set is available via the shape query parameter, and show_shapes=true reports the tree your plan can reach. See Response Shaping.

This data does not join to the federal data¶

There is no UEI, no PIID, no agency-hierarchy key and no NAICS/PSC crosswalk. organization here is three strings — state, level, agency text — not the federal 7-key office payload, and state agencies have no entry in Tango's organization tree. incumbent_name on a forecast is published text, not a resolved Tango entity.

status is Tango's, and the portal's word is separate¶

status is Tango-owned liveness, derived from the portal's own word, the response deadline and the clock, and refreshed every fifteen minutes whether or not the feed moved. It is not the feed's status: portals drop a closed solicitation rather than restating it, so most of what the feeds still call open already has a deadline in the past. The feed's word is served separately as source_status, and its full raw vocabulary sits behind the plan-gated raw.

A list request with no status or active filter returns open solicitations only. A detail request returns the solicitation whatever its status.

Observation timestamps are not publication timestamps¶

Every timestamp whose name contains seen is ours, not the agency's. A state portal restates one page in place and publishes no amendment date, so last_change_seen_at is the scrape that caught the diff and its resolution is that state's crawl cadence. first_seen_at is when we first observed the record, which is the right field to poll on and the wrong field to read as a posting date — posted_date is that, where the portal publishes one.

Category scheme tagging is partial¶

category_codes is an array of {scheme, code} objects over nigp, unspsc, naics, text and unknown. Scheme tagging is mid-migration: roughly half of all entries corpus-wide are still bare pre-migration strings with no scheme, which read as unknown.

Consequence: ?naics= matches only the small share of entries tagged as NAICS. Use ?category_code= to match a code under any scheme including the untagged strings. See Category codes.

Solicitation fields (/api/sled/opportunities/)¶

platform, native_id and external_id are accepted as support filters for reproducing a specific record with us. They are deliberately not in any response shape, and their values are not a contract — an earlier draft rendered three competing spellings of one solicitation number on a single row.

organization object¶

Three strings, not the federal office payload. There is no organization_id to join on.

contact object¶

meta object¶

attachments array¶

size_bytes and char_count only mean something together. Three megabytes that yielded no characters is a scanned image; three megabytes that yielded 40,000 characters is a specification. Neither number says that alone.

No url, and the body is paid. There is no download URL on this endpoint. The document body is served as extracted_text on the Small plan and above — opt-in only, so attachments(*) does not carry it — and is one of three plan-gated fields on this resource alongside raw and revisions.changes.

Searching that text is a different thing, and it is ungated. ?search= matches inside document text on every plan including Free, and returns the parent solicitation's id with no fragment of the document. So did a document match is free; what does it say is Small and above. Buying the body does not change search.

A document flagged is_contested never returns extracted_text, at any plan: the file we retrieved for it does not match what the solicitation listed, so we cannot vouch that its text belongs to this record.

Why meta.attachment_count can be lower than len(attachments). A generated cover sheet is a file, not a document the agency wrote, so it is excluded from the count while still being listed and flagged. The count answers "does this record hold its solicitation package"; the array answers "what files exist". A record whose only file is a generated sheet holds no package.

revisions array¶

The revisions expansion excludes enrichment rows; the nested revisions route serves them. An enrichment is Tango filling in coverage it did not have rather than the agency amending anything, which is also why it is excluded from revision_count.

History starts when Tango started reading that jurisdiction, not when the solicitation was posted. For recently added sources that is days, not months.

Forecast fields (/api/sled/forecasts/)¶

A forecast is a state's own advance notice of something it intends to buy. Maryland is the only state publishing one today. Forecasts carry no status, no deadline and no liveness filter — currency is your call from the advertisement quarter.

estimated_value object¶

The band is free text from a state spreadsheet, parsed at serve time. raw is always there to check the parse against.

Data sources¶

Solicitations and forecasts are collected from individual state, local and education procurement portals — there is no aggregated upstream feed. The set of portals grows over time; /api/sled/opportunities/coverage/ reports which jurisdictions are represented, how many records each holds, and when a record in that jurisdiction last changed.

Update frequency: per-portal crawl cadence, which differs by jurisdiction. status is recomputed every fifteen minutes independently of the crawl, so a deadline passing is reflected promptly even when the portal has not been read since.