70 -- COMPUTER SOFTWARE

Notice Date

August 29, 2000

Adminstrative Office

Department of the Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, Maxwell AFB Contracting Squadron, 50 LeMay Plaza South, Bldg 804, Maxwell AFB, AL, 36112-6334

ZIP Code

36112-6334

Solicitation Number

Reference-Number-F01600-00-AFLSASoftware

Response Due

September 28, 2000

Point of Contact

Mary Peters, Contract Specialist, Phone 334-953-2560, Fax 334-953-2198, Email mary.peters@maxwell.af.mil -- Gail Bumgardner, Contract Specialist, Phone 334-953-7212, Fax 334-953-2198, Email

E-Mail Address

Mary Peters (mary.peters@maxwell.af.mil)

Description

The 42nd Contracting Squadron, Maxwell AFB, AL, is conducting market research for computer software for the Air Force Legal Services Agency. This is not a request for proposals. If you are interested, please provide information on the your company and product to: Ms. Mary Peters or Ms. Gail Bumgardner. Reference number: F01600-00-AFLSASoftware Description: AFLSA/JAS requires software to serve as a search engine for a computer assisted legal research system (CALRS). The software must run on a Sun 450E running Solaris 2.7 (SunOS 5.7). The software should load from one or more of the following: CD-ROM or 4mm tape. As implied by the heading _ Desired Characteristics_, not all of the criteria listed below are mandatory. Desired Characteristics: 1. Full text indexing and retrieval. Legal information consists of many volumes of information. The software should index each document down to the individual word. 2. Document format. Legal information comes in many different page and electronic formats. The software should permit the document to maintain its original page format, and not require reformatting to fit rigid structural requirements. The software should be capable of loading documents in common formats, such as XML, Word Perfect, Microsoft Word, etc., in a fully searchable manner. Ideally, the software should search the data directly in its native format rather than require loading into a proprietary database format. 3. Text retrieval. Based upon a search query, the software should retrieve all documents, which satisfy the query from the specified database(s) or directories. 4. Graphics/Images. Please describe how the software handles image and graphical data embedded in indexed documents. 5. Web Spider/crawler. Please describe any capabilities of the software to index documents located on external Web sites. 6. Boolean search. The software should permit the researcher to specify a search using Boolean syntax (i.e., and, or, etc.). 7. Web browser enabled. The software should permit the researcher to submit the search query from a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc. The documents retrieved should be viewable in the same browser. 8. Proximity connectors. The software should permit the researcher to specify proximity parameters (within same field, same paragraph, same sentence, or specified number of words) for the search. For example, the researcher should be able to ask for all documents where _aggravated_ is located within three words of _assault_, and should be able to specify the order of the terms. In addition, it would be desirable to support use of parentheses to specify the order of precedence among portions of the query. 9. Field restrictions. The researcher should be able to specify which portions of the document to search. For example, the researcher should be able to limit the search to the citation of the document, or to the Judge who issued the opinion. It would be desirable for the software to recognize XML for specifying fields. 10. Date restrictions. The researcher should be able to limit the search for documents authored before, on or after a specified date. 11. Refine search capability. The researcher should be able to conduct a search, and then narrow the search to a smaller number of documents based upon additional search criteria. For example, if the search found all cases on _aggravated assault_, the researcher should be able to narrow the search to those documents retrieved, which also contain the term _automobile_. 12. Display/Print/Download formats. The software should be capable of displaying the full text of the documents, the citation of the documents, or the search terms in their context. It should permit download and printing of document, preserving the original format. 13. Document navigation. The software should be capable of quickly moving from search term to search term within the displayed document and moving quickly among documents. 14. Highlighting. Search terms must be highlighted within retrieved documents. 15. Root expansion and wildcards. The software should be capable of searching based on a part of the desired search term. For example, the researcher should be able to search on _aggravat_ plus a root expansion symbol to retrieve all documents within the specified database that contain those eight contiguous letters and any number of contiguous letters that follow. Also, the researcher should be able to use a wildcard in a word such as _mari+uana_ to retrieve _marijuana_, _marihuana_, etc. 16. Case insensitive. The software should be capable of retrieving a document containing the search terms, regardless of case. 17. Punctuation. The software should be capable of retrieving search terms containing punctuation, such as _section 402.23-5_. Please provide information on searching of hyphenated words; i.e., will a query retrieve the hyphenated word (1) if the query contains the hyphenated word (2) if the query contains one component of the hyphenated word. 18. Stop words. The software should be capable of operating with or without a stop word list. Stop words are words that are not indexed because they occur with great frequency, such as _and_, _the_, etc. 19. Natural language and ranking. The software must be capable of supporting a natural language search, and ranking the documents retrieved based on relevancy. Please indicate the algorithm or factors used in relevancy ranking. 20. RDBMS interface. The software should be capable of retrieving information stored in an RDBMS, such as MySQL or Oracle. 21. Automated Document Classification and Drill-down taxonomy. The software should support classifying documents into a topical hierarchy based upon indexed words and support drill-down capability for retrieval. 22. Hyperlinked Table of Contents. . It would be desirable for the software to support creation of a table of contents view of documents with hyperlinks to the full text. 23. Performance/Response Time. The software should quickly retrieve documents from collections or databases containing billions of characters. Performance for document indexing must also be acceptable. Please provide any limits on the size of individual documents or indexed databases or directories or on the number of concurrent users. 24. Scalable. The software should be easily upgradeable to run on newer hardware and operating systems as they become available. 25. CD-ROM. The software should support searching, under the current Microsoft operating systems, against data loaded on a CD-ROM so that researchers deployed to an operational arena with poor communications can still conduct legal research using CD-ROMs containing databases. 26. Document filtering. The software should support document filtering using perl scripts or other document filters. 27. URL addressable. Individual databases should be URL addressable. The software should support a URL string that includes the database name and the query string. 28. Easy to administer. The software should be easy to install, configure, and administer, to include loading documents into the database (if required) or indexing documents newly added to searchable directories. Document preparation should be minimal, if any is required. It should be easy to control Indexing options such as noise characters, stop words, word delimiters, sentence delimiters, paragraph delimiters, and field indicators. 29. Customizable Interface. It would be desirable for the software to allow easy customization of the user interface, including the functions and options presented to users and the ability to set default values for various options. 30. Security. It would be desirable for the software to support setting security by Web userid to control which users have read, write, and delete access to which databases or collections. 31. Storage Requirements/Compression. It is desirable for the software to have efficient storage of documents and indexes. Statistics on the amount of overhead normally required compared to the original size of the document collections would be of interest. 32. Statistics. It would be desirable for the software to provide statistics on the document collections and document indexes as well as statistics on search usage. 33. Flexible Search Capabilities. The software should support concept searching, pattern searching, thesaurus/word wheel searching, and fuzzy/soundex searching. The ability of a user to retrieve more documents like selected documents or like highlighted text within a document (without specifying a query) would be desirable. 34. Intuitive. The software should be easy to learn and use. 35. Selective Dissemination of Information. The software should allow a user to save a query to be run periodically against newly added documents with results emailed to the user automatically. 36. Software Maintenance and Customer Support. Vendor must offer telephone support to address software questions, problems, and defects and must offer maintenance to include periodic upgrades to new versions. 37. Application Conversion and Consulting Services. It would be desirable for the vendor to provide services to convert an existing text retrieval application. 38. Training. Please provide any information on training for system administrators and application developers. 39. Selection of Multiple Databases/Collections. The software must allow the user to select multiple databases or directories of indexed documents to which the query may be applied. 40. Word Equivalencies or Synonyms. It would be desirable for the software to support automatic searching for Word Equivalencies or Synonyms. 41. Automatic Plurals, Possessives, or other Word Forms. It would be desirable for the software to support automatic searching for plurals and possessives or other forms of a word, e.g., other tenses of a verb, other parts of speech (e.g., adverb, adjective, noun forms). 42. Automatic Abstracts/Summaries. It would be desirable for the software to be able to generate document abstracts or summaries and display those in the query results. 43. Search History. It would be desirable for the software to be able to display a history of queries entered by the searcher. 44. Help. The software should provide comprehensive, meaningful help. Help that is context-sensitive is preferred. 45. Error Messages. The software should provide comprehensive, meaningful, specific error messages. 46. Documentation. The vendor should provide documentation of search features, installation and configuration, system administration, error messages, security, administration of databases or directory indexing (including all indexing options), and any APIs or customization facilities. 47. Corporate Information. Information about the history, market share, and financial condition of the vendor would be of interest. 48. References. References who are using the software for large, Web-based text applications would be of great interest.

Web Link

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Record

Loren Data Corp. 20000831/70SOL009.HTM (D-242 SN491353)