SOURCES SOUGHT
D -- Enterprise Search, Taxonomy Management and Text Analytics Software
- Notice Date
- 5/26/2010
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 519130
— Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals
- Contracting Office
- Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, Office of Acquisitions and Grants Services, 5630 Fishers Lane, Room 2129, Rockville, Maryland, 20857-0001
- ZIP Code
- 20857-0001
- Solicitation Number
- FDA-SOL-10-1071273
- Archive Date
- 7/10/2010
- Point of Contact
- Brendan McCarthy, Phone: 3018274680, Sherry Solodkova, Phone: 301-827-7165
- E-Mail Address
-
Brendan.McCarthy@fda.hhs.gov, sherry.solodkova@fda.hhs.gov
(Brendan.McCarthy@fda.hhs.gov, sherry.solodkova@fda.hhs.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Sources Sought Notice From:Food & Drug Administration, Department of Health & Human Services Title:Enterprise Search, Taxonomy Management and Text Analytics Software Date:May 26, 2010 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Request for Information (RFI) This Request for Information (RFI) is for information, planning and market research purposes only and shall not be construed as either a solicitation or obligation on the part of the Food and Drug Administration or its Centers. The purpose of this RFI is to help the FDA understand the market availability, technical characteristics, and functionality of solutions, tools, or products capable of satisfying the technical, functional, and/or operational characteristics described in this RFI. FDA will use this market research information to assess the market's capability to provide the FDA's Enterprise Search (ES) Framework including advanced Taxonomy and Text Analytics capabilities either within the search engine product or as a stand-alone product to support the design and development of modern, fully electronic IT systems that create more coordinated, integrated, streamlined, consistent, reliable, and accurate operations and processes for FDA. FDA welcomes responses from all interested parties. FDA does not intend to make a selection decision or award a contract on the basis of responses nor otherwise pay for the preparation of any information submitted or FDA's use of such information. Acknowledgment of receipt of responses will not be made, nor will respondents be notified of the outcome of the FDA's evaluation of the information received. Additionally, the FDA does not intend to hold discussions concerning this RFI with any interested parties. Objective: The objective of this effort is to discover the technology options available for a modern, forward thinking enterprise search framework solution with Taxonomy Management and Text Analytics capabilities. The overall goals of FDA's Enterprise Search Framework is to integrate knowledge discovery and analysis capabilities within and across FDA's structured and unstructured data sources, business processes, and information technology applications and to develop a system and process for FDA staff to quickly access relevant information for FDA administrative, product quality, pre-market and post-market regulatory responsibilities and Consumer notifications. Instructions: Interested parties shall submit the following information along with other documentation that would help the FDA better understand the functional capabilities of available products/solutions. 1.Marketing and technical reference materials related to your product/solution (marketing materials should include information related to the implementation and compatibility of the product/solution). This information should address the capabilities outlined in Part I and II below). 2.Online/Web based product tutorial that will be temporarily be accessed and used by the FDA program team, if available (provide access information). 3.Narrative explaining why the product/solution is forward thinking (Please limit this narrative to three pages). 4.List of where product/solution is currently in use. 5.Any other documentation that will help the FDA better understand the functional capabilities of your product/solution (Please limit this narrative to five pages). 6.A brief narrative on the direction in which Enterprise Search Framework technologies are headed and what is to come in the future (Please limit this narrative to five pages). 7.Explain the training and/or online help that would be available to the end users with your product/solution. 8.Provide a written explanation for points that standard marketing or technical reference materials do not explain (Please limit this narrative to five pages). 9.Provide publicly available pricing information, price lists, pricing strategies, discount strategies, etc. Provide and explain pricing model(s) (i.e., license-based, user based, number of documents, peak queries per second (qps), average qps, size of all documents/files/text within documents, size of index file(s), other. Include annual maintenance model. Provide the pricing model for training offered. Provide the pricing model for your professional services offering. 10.Disclose weather your business is the manufacturer/builder of the product/solution or if your business is a reseller or third party. 11.Please provide documentation of the size of your business. If you are classified as a small business, HubZone small business, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, Woman-owned small business and/or 8(a) certified small business please provide a capability statement in addition to the other information for acquisition strategy determination. 12.Please provide the following: a.Organization name b.Organization's website c.Contact Name d.Contact Telephone e.Contact E-mail address f.Size designation g.Number of employees in your organization h.Your organization's current and gross revenue (past year?) 13.Explain whether or not your product adheres to Section 508 Accessibility Requirements which requires Federal agencies to ensure that individuals with disabilities who are members of the public or Federal employees have access to and use of electronic and information technology (EIT) that is comparable to that provided to individuals without disabilities. See http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm for more information. 14.Provide information concerning contract vehicles available to be used by the FDA in acquiring your product (GSA Federal Schedules, Governmentwide Acquisition Contract, SmartBuy, etc.). Capabilities/Requirements of Interest: PART I - Search Engine Product (Please provide marketing materials or other technical reference materials to address the areas outlined below. Information provided should be related to your Search Engine Product). 1.Search Features A.Basic Features Information describing your technology's overall approach to basic search, including Wildcard Searching capabilities, case sensitive queries, Query by Example methodology, etc. and how the spellchecker works including the capability of incorporating 3rd party dictionaries. B.Advanced Search Information describing your technology's advanced search capabilities, such as: 1.Fielded or Parametric Search 2.Advanced Query language 3.Search Query Auto-Complete 4.Natural Language Queries 5.Soundex - "sounds like" 6.Fuzzy Search 7.Date Range Search 8.Ability to search within results 9.User options such as choice of relevance ranking emphasis 2.Presentation/Structure of Search Results A.Presentation Information describing your product's capabilities in presenting results sets. If some features require a customization or development effort, please indicate that and provide a rough estimate of the effort involved. Include information on the following topics: 1.Term Highlighting 2.Display options - relevance, date, location, other 3.Host or Site Level results grouping 4.Display document and metadata information 5.Display the number of hits per category (taxonomy, facet, etc.) 6.Document Preview 7.Display XML and/or native source content 8.Visualization capabilities including Tag Clouds 9.Document types (i.e. MS Office, PDF, etc.) B.Refinement of Search Results Information describing your product's capabilities in refining results sets. If some features require a customization or development effort, please indicate and provide a rough of magnitude about the effort involved. Include information, such as: 1.Clustering related documents 2.Faceted navigation - include customization and display options 3.See related searches 3.Administration A.Administration of Search Information describing your product's administration capabilities, user interface, and ability to control relevance ranking factors and provide sample screen shots. Include information on the following topics: 1.Creation and management of user or group profiles 2.Ability to designate best bets or other featured content 3.Ability to boost relevance of a document and/or block a document from the results 4.Search Activity reporting - time spent, zero returns, most common search terms, etc. 5.Advanced search activity - track / analysis of queries by taxonomy node, categorization, top viewed documents, etc. B.Relevancy Tuning Information describing Relevancy tuning options available and capabilities available for users vs. administrators vs. API to do (ex. based on tagging, based on past searches). C.Administration of Output from Text Analytics Information describing administrative capabilities within the search engine technology - if the administration is primarily handled by a text analytics software package that is or can be integrated into your search technology, please indicate and specify vendors' products that are or have been integrated with your product. D.Save and Share Queries and Query Results 1.Ability to allow users to create and save queries for re-use at a later time? 2.Saved queries be shared with other users? 3.Users copy & modify an existing saved query from their own saved queries and from other user's queries? 4.Security Information describing your technology's security capabilities, including the following topics: 1.Document level security, ex. LDAP, Active Directory, File system security? 2.Describe your product's ability to utilize database security credentials for users and groups 3.Does your product support both early binding and late binding security? 4.Describe the process of integrating your product with other security tools (custom schemes, SSO, SiteMinder, etc) 5.Describe ability to use Content Management, Web Content Management, Enterprise Records Management, and other publishing software's security. 6.Please describe how security is administered - forms and/or other. 7.Facet security - at facet level and/or document hits 8.Protection of personally identifiable information-PII & other redaction capabilities. 5.General Technical Information describing your product's general technical capabilities and features, providing the factors that impact performance on the following topics: 1.Scalability / Load Balancing / Failover 2.Overall Performance including queries per second 3.Support for z39.50 protocol 4.Open Search Interoperability 5.Crawler Speed and Architecture 6.Support for virtual and ‘Cloud' Systems 7.Supported Operating Systems 8.Programming Language(s) 9.Mobile devices support 6.Indexing and Crawling A.General Indexing Information describing your technology's indexing capabilities, including system limits and including the following topics: 1.Identify supported content types - xml, variety of doc types - text, html, Word, image, email, databases, etc. 2.Follow Javascript during indexing 3.Describe indexer speed and the factors that can impact it 4.Concurrent Indexing 5.Incremental, static, and/or dynamic indexing capabilities 6.Ability to store non-predefined metadata values 7.Limits to the number of document that can be associated with a term 8.Disk Space requirements as percentage of source text 9.Ability to crawl and index database content 10.Real-time indexing capabilities B.Crawling Rules Information describing your technology's crawling capabilities, including system limits and including the following topics: 1.Specifying content - by directory, MIME type 2.Duplicate documents 3.Determination of document date 4.What dates are available to the index - including a ‘first seen on' date C.Error Processing Information describing your technology's error processing capabilities, including the following topics: 1.How does the crawler handle bad links 2.Failure recovery 3.Handling redirects 4.Debugging access problems D.Special Features Information describing your technology's capabilities to support the following special features, including the following topics: 1.User Language support - which languages 2.Image, Video, and other non-text files - metadata only or more 7.Social Search A.Social Search Overview 1.Social search features available out of the box. 2.Additional details on the specific capabilities and how each feature is implemented. 3.Supports of ‘expert finder' capability to identify employees, groups, authors, scientific disciplines, and/or people with specific experience or skills, internal or external to the organization. 4.Information describing if users have to explicitly profile themselves or does the product track user search and viewing activity to implicitly understand a person's interest/expertise? Can these be overridden if the engine mis-profiles a user? B.Social or Behavioral Ranking Information describing if your product has the ability to allow users to rank content in relation to a query and see the results of other users ranking? C.User Tagging/Folksonomies Information describing ability to allow users to add metadata tags to documents and to see the cumulative results of other users tagging. D.Personal Profiles Information describing if your product has the ability to incorporate user personal profiles into ordering search results, suggesting queries, and other aspects of search (i.e., results are biased by the user's role or search/browse history). 8.Federated Search Information describing your product's ability to display results from multiple external search sources, i.e., internet, subscription databases/websites, federate from other search engines, etc. Description may include the following: 1.The distinctive features available with your product, i.e. alerts. 2.How federation configured, with an admin console or by editing configuration files? 3.How federation solution handle security among different logins and content sources inside and outside the firewall (i.e., user login for Oracle database vs. login to SharePoint vs. subscription database) 4.How results are aggregated and displayed (ex., by ranking, source, etc.) 5.Description of the indexing method used and if indexes are stored locally. 9.Metadata - Text Analytics Information describing your product's capabilities to utilize metadata and text analytics features. Description of features built into your search platform - or description of some of the features in the Text Analytics part of this document. Information about the following topics: 1.Redaction / access to documents based on content such as privacy 2.Stemming, Lemmatization 3.Synonyms 4.Support for controlled vocabularies and/or thesauri 5.Dynamic document summaries and/or snippets 6.Entity, concept, event extraction 7.Categorization of subject of documents 8.Clustering PART II - Taxonomy Management and Text Analytics Product (Please provide marketing materials or other technical reference materials to address the areas outlined below. Information provided should be related to your product's Taxonomy Management and Text Analytics Product features) 10.Taxonomy Management A.Basic Taxonomy Editing Information describing your product's basic editing capabilities and include information on the following topics: 1.Copy, paste, rename, move, delete 2.Scope notes, description fields 3.Unique term names / identifiers 4.Spell check 5.Test for Duplicate, reciprocal relationships 6.Synonyms and variants 7.Ability to manage multiple taxonomies 8.Ability to support polyhierarchy 9.Support for multiple languages B.Advanced Taxonomy Editing Information describing your product's advanced taxonomy editing features and include as much detail as possible on the following topics: 1.Specify node relationships - parent-child, etc. 2.Support for facet development 3.Multiple authors 4.Security and Access Rights 5.Change tracking and versioning 6.Multiple views of the taxonomy such as hierarchical and alphabetical 7.Usability of the user interface 8.Taxonomy statistics reports 11.Technical and Integration Information describing your product's technical and integration capabilities and include the following topics: 1.Support for standards (ANSI, NIO) 2.Multiple import/export formats including XML SKOS, Excel, etc. 3.Support for multiple file formats 4.API's and or SDK - general programming capabilities 5.Search integration capabilities 6.Content Management capabilities 7.Technical requirements - operating systems, etc. 12.Text Analytics A.Basic Information describing your product's text analytics capabilities, including the following topics: 1.Entity extraction - by catalog and/or pattern or rule based 2.Summarization rules 3.Clustering and/or automatic taxonomy node generation 4.Categorization with training sets 5.Categorization by terms and a query language (Boolean) 6.Concept and/or event extraction 7.Fact extraction 8.Sentiment Analysis B.Text Analytics Indexing and Refinement Information describing your product's text analytics indexing capabilities, including the following topics: 1.Index documents and apply text analytics 2.Relevancy ranked document sets 3.Ability to customize relevancy options 4.Document markup - ability to see why a document scored what it did. C.Categorization Report / Analysis Information describing your product's ability to produce reports on result of applying the categorization/taxonomy rules to a selected content set.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/HHS/FDA/DCASC/FDA-SOL-10-1071273/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: TBD, United States
- Record
- SN02160754-W 20100528/100526235011-eb1069891e0268e7c1cf1eb5b8c60629 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)
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