acikpoz
Turkish public construction unit prices, turned from a PDF into data you can compute with.

Every public construction job in Turkey is priced against a government catalog: the ÇŞB
(Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı) birim fiyat books — thousands of unit
prices (a poz: a code, a description, a unit, a price) that estimators, contractors and
auditors all read. They ship as long PDFs. acikpoz turns those pages back into structured
records, deterministically, so a cost estimate or a tender preparation can be computed
instead of copied by hand.
It is disciplined geometry, not a language model: it groups the words on a page into visual
rows and reads the price column's position from the page header rather than guessing a
fixed spot. That one decision is what makes it trustworthy — some sections (Sıhhi Tesisat,
say) print two numbers per row, the real Birim Fiyat and a separate Montaj Bedeli, and a
naive parser silently reads the wrong one. acikpoz reads the header, so it reads the right
column.
Paired with ihalent (which structures tender
results), acikpoz covers the other half of Turkey's public construction economy: the
prices the results are measured against.
The one rule it never breaks
A price is only ever a number the catalog actually printed in the price column. It never
coerces, never borrows a neighbour's figure, never guesses. Two consequences, both on
purpose:
- A group-header poz — a category title like
EVİYELER: whose sub-items carry the real
prices — has no price of its own. acikpoz leaves its fiyat as None and flags
is_group_header. It does not invent a zero.
- A poz the catalog left without a printed price is a gap, surfaced and counted, not
hidden. Every result reports its coverage: how many pozes were priced, how many were
headers, how many were genuine gaps.
Half the value of a cost tool is refusing to make up the numbers the source did not print.
That is the same honesty discipline as andon
and ihalent.
Install
pip install acikpoz # add [mcp] for the MCP server: pip install "acikpoz[mcp]"
Quick start
Point it at an official catalog PDF you have (acikpoz ships the parser, not the data):
acikpoz parse bf2026.pdf --pages 8-20
acikpoz parse bf2026.pdf --json > pozes.jsonl # one poz per line, for pipelines
acikpoz parse bf2026.pdf --csv pozes.csv # Excel-ready (utf-8-sig, Turkish text)
acikpoz parse bf2026.pdf --group 25 # only Sıhhi Tesisat pozes
acikpoz parse bf2026.pdf --priced-only # drop headers and gaps
The table view (shape shown with illustrative values, not real catalog figures):
poz birim fiyat TL tanım
15.100.1003 m³ 54,88 1 m³ taşın taşıtlara yüklenmesi
15.100.1005 Ton 434,05 1 ton çelik borunun taşıtlara yüklenmesi
25.110.1000 - - ALATURKA HELA TESİSATI: (group header)
407 priced · 6 group headers · 43 price gaps · grade good (90% of non-header
pozes priced) · 16 page(s) read.
The grade (excellent/good/fair/poor) is a glanceable confidence signal, the
way camelot exposes accuracy: below good, review the pages before trusting the
output. --json includes price_parse_rate and grade per parse.
Or from Python:
from acikpoz import parse_catalog
result = parse_catalog("bf2026.pdf", pages=range(8, 20))
for p in result.pozes:
if p.is_priced:
print(p.poz_no, p.birim, p.fiyat)
print(result.to_dict()["counts"])
How it works
- Rows. Words are grouped into visual rows by vertical position (a few points of
tolerance), then sorted left-to-right.
- Price column, from the header. The
Fiyat header word on the right (x > 400) gives
the price column's x. A stray "fiyat" in a left-column description can't be mistaken for
it.
- Cells. For each poz row: the leftmost cell is the poz code; the price is the
number-shaped token nearest the price-column x; the unit sits just left of it; the rest is
the description. Indented continuation lines extend the running description (and can carry
a price that spilled over).
- Group headers. A price-less poz whose description ends in
: is a category title —
flagged, not treated as a gap.
Compare two catalog years
Catalogs are reissued regularly; the question estimators and auditors track by hand is how
did this year's rates move from last year's? acikpoz diff answers it — it joins two years
by poz code and classifies each change:
acikpoz diff bf2025.pdf bf2026.pdf --pages 8-400
acikpoz diff bf2025.pdf bf2026.pdf --tolerance 1 # hide sub-1-TL rounding noise
acikpoz diff bf2025.pdf bf2026.pdf --json
It reports price moves (with Δ and %Δ), added and removed pozes, unit changes, and pozes
that gained or lost a printed price — plus the mean price %-change for the year. As far
as the research found, no other open tool does year-over-year diffing for ÇŞB catalogs.
Validate a parse
Before a parsed catalog feeds a cost estimate, it helps to know it is clean. acikpoz validate runs deterministic quality rules over the pozes — no ML, no fixing, only surfacing:
acikpoz validate bf2026.pdf --pages 8-400
acikpoz validate bf2026.pdf --json
It flags duplicate poz codes, malformed codes, non-positive prices (errors), and priced
pozes with no unit or a unit outside the known set (warnings). It exits non-zero on any
error, so it can gate a pipeline (acikpoz validate … && build-estimate). This is also how
acikpoz stays honest about its own limits: in sections that print the unit once on a group
header and let the rows inherit it (Sıhhi Tesisat), per-row unit detection is weak, and
validate says so rather than hiding it. Price, poz code and description stay reliable.
Using acikpoz with AI agents
An MCP server (pip install 'acikpoz[mcp]', then acikpoz-mcp) exposes three tools:
parse_catalog (a PDF → structured pozes with honest coverage), diff (two catalog years
→ classified changes), and validate (a PDF → quality findings). The agent gets structured
data back, not prose it has to parse. Pair it with ihalent and an agent can reason across
both a tender's result and the unit prices it was measured against.
{ "mcpServers": { "acikpoz": { "command": "acikpoz-mcp" } } }
Scope, honestly
- It reads the standard catalog layout. The header-driven column detection handles the
common single- and two-price-column pages well; an unusual layout may leave more gaps —
which it reports rather than papering over. If a section parses badly, that's a bug worth a
sample.
- It is a parser, not a price database. It does not bundle or redistribute the catalog.
You bring the official PDF; acikpoz turns your copy into data.
- Prices are nominal, as printed. No inflation adjustment is baked in — that's an
analysis choice the caller makes knowing the year.
Data, and why the PDFs aren't here
The ÇŞB catalogs are official public documents, but this repository does not redistribute
them: it ships the parser and nothing else, and .gitignore keeps *.pdf out. Point acikpoz
at the catalog you obtained from the official source. This is the same line ihalent draws —
own the tool, not the data.
How this project is built
I'm an industrial engineer working in construction; I read these catalogs. I designed the
parsing approach — geometry over machine learning, honest gaps over invented numbers — and I
review every line; I use AI agents heavily for implementation speed, and the commit trailers
say so. The contract is the tests: they encode the exact word geometry a real page emits,
including the two-column Sıhhi Tesisat trap and the group-header rule, so green tests mean the
parser handles the real thing.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.