GOVERNMENT-INDUSTRY CONFERENCE: ADVANCED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW INFORMATION AND DATA SOURCES POC: Frederick L Haynes voice 703-487-4080, fax 703-487-4006, e-mail: pp000649@interramp.com. Sources Sought for Advanced Information Technologies and New Information and Data Sources: To expand their knowledge of vendor capabilities and to open communications about federal information management requirements, the federal scientific and technical information community through CENDI, (the interagency group composed of Commerce, Energy, NASA, National Library of Medicine and Defense Information managers), in collaboration with the Community Open Source Program Office, (COSPO), among others, will sponsor a government-industry conference in June 1995 in the Washington, DC area. The purpose of this conference is to discuss government user needs, exchange ideas and demonstrate off-the-shelf tools, methods, technologies and information products suitable to meet these needs. The meeting will focus on available off the shelf technologies, and information and data sources. Technologies for working with sources of information located outside the United States and in non-English languages are a particular focus for part of the federal audience at this conference. A secondary focus is mid-term technology development efforts. Products that will not be available within 5 years are beyond the scope of this meeting. Interested private and public sector organizations are invited to submit proposals to make a formal presentation and/or participate through exhibits or poster sessions at the conference. The event will present an opportunity to showcase developments. This is not a procurement action, nor does the government intend to pay for the supplied information. Offerings should be compatible with existing platforms and open systems, e.g., UNIX and DOS. The areas of immediate interest include but are not limited to the following: I) TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE for INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION: A) Security, 1. Fire-walls and secure protocols; 2. Assurance for simultaneous connection of a single workstation to classified and un-classified networks (R&D to permit a policy determination); 3. Products that prevent data-driven attacks; 4. Protection for transfer of sensitive information via the Internet (e.g., credit card, limited proprietary data); 5; Encryption on the Internet; 6. Monitoring unauthorized access attempts. B) Communications (Telecommunications and networking), 1. Wireless communications; 2. Enabling devices that operate in a carrier's geographic coverage area; a) Technology to support tariffs and billing; b) Capabilities beyond existing switching technology; c) Technology to resolve regulatory issues; 3. Technology to connect wireless to terrestrial systems; 4. Bandwidth to transmit multimedia information; 5. Compression technologies for multimedia delivery; 6. Electronic billing via Internet; 7. Audiovisual (video conferencing) technology, including file sharing during sessions. II) INFORMATION COLLECTION / ACQUISITION / DISCOVERY / RETRIEVAL: A) ``Smart'' search techniques for automation-aided information retrieval; 1. Gateways and directory navigation (``pull technologies'') operating over a WAN; a) Information locators, worms, web crawlers, etc. b) Intelligent software agents (knowbots, drones, ``probots'' (profiling knowbots), etc; c) Knowledge discovery to extract implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data; i) Dependency detection; ii) Analysis of changes; iii) Detection of anomalies; d) Data summarization; e) Clustering, (i.e., grouping of related items for browsing and searching); 2. Searching and browsing of multimedia data, (e.g., images, video); 3. Navigating and searching across distributed, multiple heterogeneous databases; 4. Presentation of integrated result sets of heterogeneous data types. III) INFORMATION PROCESSING (POST-RETRIEVAL, PRE-ANALYSIS PROCESSING): A) Conversion/integration technologies; 1. Hardcopy conversion concept of operations; 2. Data fusion, integration (text, data, images) and presentation; 3. Automatic generation of metadata (i.e., data about data) and other automation-aided indexing; 4. Media conversion (microfiche to electronic form, using scanning and OCR); 5. Tagging (e.g., SGML) of multimedia (especially image) data; 6. Integration of geographic information systems (GIS) technology; 7. Scanning technology - OCR and other; 8. Multi-lingual OCR with high accuracy for poor print and copy text; 9. Automated correction tools for OCR errors for multiple languages; a) Tools using syntax, linguistics, and grammars; b) Lexicons for spell checking and keyword extraction in specialized areas of interest; 10. Machine translation; a) Machine-aided translation; b) Translation of languages (other than Russian, German, Romance); 11. Document management in a full-text electronic (digital library) environment, including input, storage, retrieval, and dissemination; a) ``Push'' technologies; b) Publishing (including multi-media authoring and presentation); c) CD-ROM production (lower cost, in-house, one copy); d) Multi-format support (conversion technologies); e) Compound documents; f) Client/server compatibility; g) Support for object technology (including object linking and embedding capabilities) h) Archiving; i) Massive digital data storage (optical disk and other technology); j) Compression technologies for multi-media products; k) Workflow management. IV) EXPLOITATION TOOLS FOR PRODUCTION, ANALYSIS AND USE: A) Tool sets and capabilities; 1. Scalability (upwards in terms of volume and complexity of material) for current profiling tools, retrieval, and filtering algorithms; 2. Hardware for advanced visualization, summarization, or input; 3. Integrating visualization tools with language-based tools; 4. Robust speech and language understanding technology; 5. User-friendly GUI interfaces and human-computer interfaces for all of the above exploitation technologies; 6. Natural language understanding, especially to extract names, places, and relationships; 7. Natural language queries in English on foreign language databases (response in English). V) SOURCES OF INFORMATION AND DATA: There is also an interest in expanding the acquisition and utilization of open source information and data on foreign subjects from domestic and foreign sources. To that end, information is sought on new sources for all geographic and topical subjects. Specific areas of interest include foreign developments dealing with: A) National, bilateral, and multi-lateral economic trends and activities; B) National political events and organizations; C) Environmental developments and governments' actions; D) Scientific and technology developments and breakthroughs; E) Military and security forces organizations, capabilities and locations; F) National infrastructures (air, land, sea, communications; G) Industries and their products/customers; H) Political, industrial, economic, social and governmental information on Africa and Latin America. Technology providers or information providers who work with technology providers are encouraged to respond to this announcement with product information. VI) AUDIENCE: The audience will be composed primarily of Federal Managers and major operating contractors who have information-related responsibilities and who are able to commit resources to address their information needs, and acquire appropriate solutions. They will represent components engaged in acquiring information in a multimedia environment, providing intermediary information processing services, and using the information for analysis/research, support to policy and decision makers, and operations. VII) RESPONSE: If you are interested, send two abstracts of your offerings with a set of three to six key terms or phrases that categorize your presentations or exhibit subject. You should use the phrases listed above in the noted interest areas or offer additional, but relevant concepts. With the abstracts send two copies of more detailed descriptions of offerings including duplicate copies of attachments to: MITRE CORPORATION, 7525 COLSHIRE DRIVE, McLEAN, VIRGINIA 22102, ATTENTION: OPEN SOURCE INDUSTRY DAY, (MAIL STOP Z-160). Your response must arrive no later than 20 March 1995. Depending on the responses received, the length of the meeting and the specific session structure will be determined. All respondents will be contacted as the planning for the conference proceeds.

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