National Library of Medicine, Office of Acquisitions Management, Building 38A, Room B1N17, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894

D -- SOFTWARE SERVICES FOR SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT OF INQUERY POC Valerie Syed, Contract Specialist, (301) 496-6546. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) intends to negotiate with the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) of the University of Massachusetts on a sole-source basis for a fixed-price type purchase order for a six month period of performance for software services needed to support and further develop CIIR's proprietary R&D product INQUERY, an advanced information retrieval software. As a member of CIIR, NLM already has license to use the INQUERY software, but additional technical support is needed. NLM has selected INQUERY as a retrieval engine for its large databases, including MEDLINE, having prototyped and evaluated the product for this purpose. For the past year, skilled software professionals at NLM have been developing a prototype retrieval system for MEDLINE using INQUERY. However, the size of NLM's MEDLINE database, the specialized medical vocabulary and other searching requirements peculiar to NLM have raised implementation questions that can not be answered adequately by the NLM team. NLM requires the expertise of individuals who have a detailed technical knowledge of the internal design and workings of INQUERY. NLM requires CIIR to tune and customize INQUERY in order to satisfy NLM's functional and performance requirements for a production system. Most of the outstanding problems can be solved with an appropriate implementation of existing INQUERY capabilities, but some changes to the basic INQUERY product (source code) will be needed. Since INQUERY is the product of ongoing R&D efforts, technical documentation and an established technical support organization is not readily available to respond to NLM's required changes to the product. CIIR is the only source that has the technical knowledge to modify and enhance INQUERY's capabilities, subtleties and internal architecture. No source other than CIIR can provide the necessary support based upon its knowledge of this research product. Furthermore, the INQUERY source code is a proprietary product of CIIR. This notice of intent is not a Request For Proposals (RFQ), nor is an RFQ available. Based on authority cited in 41 U.S.C. 253(c)(1) (FAR 6.302-1(a)(2)), award to CIIR without full and open competition is planned. (See numbered Note 22.) (0156)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0030 19960605\D-0001.SOL)