SOLICITATION NOTICE
A -- Service Oriented Information Management
- Notice Date
- 5/13/2010
- Notice Type
- Presolicitation
- NAICS
- 541712
— Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Biotechnology)
- Contracting Office
- Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, New York, 13441-4514
- ZIP Code
- 13441-4514
- Solicitation Number
- BAA-10-08-RIKA
- Point of Contact
- Lynn G. White, Phone: (315) 330-4996
- E-Mail Address
-
Lynn.White@rl.af.mil
(Lynn.White@rl.af.mil)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Service Oriented Information Management ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial Announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA-10-08-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: The Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI), Rome Research Site, is soliciting white papers under this announcement for innovative technologies to enable the effective management of information for military operations. AFRL/RI has been conducting research in the areas of information dissemination and management. Resultant approaches have focused on the creation of services-based information management techniques. This research has led to the development of a series of information dissemination and management reference implementations based on an abstract architecture for information management. The continued development of innovative concepts and enhanced services that maximize the value of information to support the objectives of the military enterprise is the primary focus of this BAA. Background : The Information Management Branches of the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Rome Research Site, are researching and developing techniques and services for information sharing and management. Information Management (IM) is defined as a set of intentional activities to maximize the value of information to support the objectives of the military enterprise. These activities include the promulgation of standards, control of information and the administrative activities that support it. Data capture and discovery, data shaping, dissemination, manipulation for exploitation, persistence and destruction of information supporting the entire enterprise information lifecycle, all provide an information advantage and allows the proficient sharing of information across the Department of Defense (DoD) and with mission partners. An information centric technology view is central to the AFRL Information Management vision. Understanding how concepts for sharing information amongst multiple producers, consumers and operational domains and the technologies that can be applied in the unique military operational and tactical domains are of critical importance. These information sharing techniques will be established based on multiple factors such as geographic regions, functional requirements, organizational boundaries, and network topology/infrastructure. The necessary modes of interaction will require higher-level services where service agreements help manage the interactions in a seamless and efficient manner. The objective of IM is to discover, contextualize, and share quality information among producers and consumers within available resources and policy constraints. This must be accomplished across network and enclave boundaries to enable true information dominance. Information deemed "quality" information is trusted, pertinent and relevant while adhering to temporal constraints. Trusted information is of known provenance, evaluable, confidential and available with integrity. The pertinence of information is determined by the appropriate granularity, format, fidelity, and transfer rate of the information. Relevant information conforms to the role and mission of the consumer and is significantly related to information criticality. The timeliness of information ensures temporal relevance to support an action or decision. The quantum of managed information, referred to as a Managed Information Object (MIO), is comprised of a payload (e.g., document, imagery, or video clip) and metadata that characterizes the payload context (e.g., topic, time, and location). Information repositories and an information catalogue represent major entities within the information space that assist both consumers and producers in assuring their information requirements are satisfied. The MIO metadata is used in the information catalog to describe what information is currently available or may become available in the future. The four major technical areas addressed in this BAA, Federated Information Spaces, Mission-Driven Quality of Service, Survivable Information Services and Dynamic Information Relationship Exploitation are of current interest to the Information Directorate and support the development and operation of AFRL Information technology goals. Federated Information Spaces : Information management involves a set of actors who interact with the information infrastructure and are categorized as producers, consumers, federates and managers. Producers are information space clients that add information to the information space. That information will reside in either persistent or transient information repositories. Producers may publish information, advertise capabilities, process feedback from consumers, receive requests for information or retract inaccurate information. Consumers are information space clients that request and utilize information within the information space via a subscription or by issuing a search. Consumers can browse, query, subscribe, transform and assess the suitability of information within the information space. Multiple-connected information spaces are referred to as "federated information spaces." Federates virtually extend the contents of an information space by appropriately sharing information among other federation members. The federation interfaces to the information space encompass trust management, confidentiality and integrity management, policy mediation, content filtering, information replication, and pass-through processing activities. Federation managers are software components responsible for policy, resource management, maintenance services and processes that permit the information space to process information demands in a secure, timely, and reliable manner. Manager responsibilities are as follows: monitor and control the information; navigate and understand the syntactic relationships among MIO types; dictate, understand and delegate prevailing security policies on MIO types; monitor and control resource allocation and performance; ensure accurate data mediation; configure and monitor effectiveness of information support; establish and maintain federated space relationships; maintain information space currency; and audit information infrastructure transactions. A single universal information space is unlikely to be achieved in any sufficiently complex military endeavor and it will be necessary to have multiple information spaces where clients need to breach both logical and physical boundaries to retrieve the information they require. The desire is to have the information itself foster a connection forming a federation that allows an information space to be ‘extended' by the contents of another. The advantage provided by this class of federation is providing consumers a "single" information space. Producers merely share information within their ‘native' information space and federation services ensure that it is shared appropriately with other federate members. Having the information spaces interact directly will require service agreements between the respective information spaces. Mission-Driven Quality of Service : The layers of services that form the information management infrastructure empower an information space wherein information is managed directly, rather than delegating all information management responsibilities to applications that produce and consume information. Actors interact with one another indirectly through the information space and the layers of services that manage the information within the information space. The activities of information management can be organized into multiple service layers. These service layers include security, workflow, Quality of Service (QoS), transformation, brokerage, and information space maintenance. The security layer includes access control, transaction and audit logging, security policy with federated information spaces, identity protection and an ability to sanitize content. The primary functions that enable effective enterprise workflows are managing workflow configurations, which encompass instantiating and maintaining workflows and assessing and optimizing their performance. The QoS layer is responsible for ensuring that an information management system can best serve the needs of its consumers, producers and federated information spaces when faced with changing operating conditions in the communication and information levels within available resources. Activities that can be performed in an information space to increase service quality in the information domain are: respond to client context, allocate resources to clients, prioritize results and replicate information. The primary activities within the transformation layer are contextualizing information, transforming MIOs (e.g. interoperability), state- and context-sensitive information processing and supporting user and manager defined processing functions. The role of the brokerage layer is to match available (or potentially available) information to information needs. The brokerage layer is responsible for processing queries, supporting browsing, maintaining subscriptions, notifying consumers, processing requests for information, and supporting federated information space proxies. The maintenance layer interacts directly with the underlying information space. It is responsible for posting new information to the information space repositories, verifying the format of posted information, informing the brokerage layer of the introduction of new MIOs, managing the lifecycle of MIOs in the repositories, managing internal information space performance, providing support for configuration management of models stored in the information space (e.g., work flow models and MIO types) and for retrieving specific MIOs from the information space repositories. Survivable Information Services: Current IM services lack sufficient protection against malicious attacks, planned and unplanned disruptions, corruption and leakage of information. Improving the survivability for the next generation of (IM) services can be accomplished by extending current architecture and design techniques to include Information Assurance (IA)-cognizant and survivable methodologies. Mechanisms for preserving system availability, integrity, and confidentiality will support continued operation through sustained cyber attacks while avoiding a single point of failure. Further development of information-centric activity monitoring mechanisms, which allow capture of activities across distributed services, will provide a greater level of insight into service capability and real-time state information. Dynamic Information Relationship Exploitation: The role of the Information Catalogue is to maintain meta-information representative of information inherent to use of the information space. The meta-information may include the stored information index, models (the taxonomy of the different MIOs supported by the information space) and producer and consumer client status. The information repositories receive, maintain, and provide the actual pieces of information or MIOs. An important factor driving the effectiveness of IM services is the degree to which metadata describes available information. Static, document-centric IM solutions have led to inefficiencies in relational semantics and the absence of the ability to adequately correlate dynamic information sources. This has created a fundamental requirement to create a more adaptive and organic information model. The exploration of techniques for establishing autonomic information relationships will aid in exploiting related information between information instances and classes. Developing solutions for dynamic information grouping, group management and exploitation capabilities will enable cross and multi-type subscription and query provisioning. Refining the flexibility in the model and enabling any existing information to be managed while exploiting its native format and processing algorithms is vital. Enabling transparent mechanisms that exploit interrelationship between multiple types of information to dynamically create new, more comprehensive information should also be explored. Additional reference information: 1. "Phoenix: SOA based information management services" http://link.aip.org/link/?PSISDG/7350/73500P/1 2. "A Reference Model for Information Management to Support Coalition Information Sharing Needs" http://www.dodccrp.org/events/10th_ICCRTS/CD/papers/274.pdf For more information about information management, the DoD Information Management & Information Technology Strategic Plan 2008-2009 can be found at: http://www.defenselink.mil/cio-nii/docs/DoDCIO_Strat_Plan.pdf All white papers should address solutions based on the development of non-proprietary, modular components (including the delivery of source code) that will be capable of integrating into existing or emerging IM infrastructures. The objectives of this BAA is to solve the technical problems inherent to moving beyond manipulation of information as a set of singular objects and focus on information quality, relationships, and fault tolerance. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $24.9 Million. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 10 - $1 Million; FY 11 - $6 Million; FY 12 - $6 Million; FY 13 - $6 Million; and FY14 - $5.9 Million. Individual awards will not normally exceed 30 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $150,000 to $500,000 per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants and cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All potential applicants are eligible. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Lynn G. White, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-4996 or e-mail Lynn.White@rl.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the title and BAA-10-08-RIKA. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITATING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. See Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL/Rome Research Sites "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): A Guide for Industry," April 2007, may be accessed at: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference%2DNumber%2DBAAGUIDE/listing.html 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 2 to 3 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Cost of Task, Name of Company; Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, a fax number, and an e-mail address with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 10 should be submitted by 24 May 10; FY 11 by 02 Aug 10; FY 12 by 01 Aug 11; FY 13 by 01 Aug 12; FY 14 by 01 Aug 13. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2014, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: https://www.dss.mil/portal/ShowBinary/BEA%20Repository/new_dss_internet//isp/fac_clear/download_nispom.html. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Robert Flo AFRL/RISD, reference BAA-10-08-RIKA, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505. Respondents are required to provide their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number with their submittal and reference BAA-10-08-RIKA. Electronic submission to Robert.Flo@rl.af.mil will also be accepted. Please include the text "BAA-10-08-RIKA" in the subject line. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed in following order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government. Criteria, (1) through (3) are of equal importance and criteria (4) is of lesser importance than criteria (1) through (3): (1) Overall Scientific and Technical Merit - The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, the approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, integration approach, innovative and novel approach and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly intervals, (2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge, (3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness and (4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs and fees (if any) should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. Cost sharing will not be considered in the evaluation. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will review the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, or comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after proposal submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a SECRET facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to SECRET information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. Data subject to export control constraints may be involved and only firms holding certification under the US/Canada Joint Certification Program (JCP) (www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp) are allowed access to such data. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offeror's will be required to submit their reporting requirement through one of our web-based, reporting systems known as JIFFY or TFIMS. Prior to award, the offeror will be notified which reporting system they are to use, and will be given complete instructions regarding its use. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC: Robert Flo Telephone: (315) 330-2324 Email: Robert.Flo@rl.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: Lynn.White@rl.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5315.90, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Aug 2005) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Susan Hunter Building 15, Room 225 1864 Fourth Street Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 225-5036; Comm: (937) 255-7754 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
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