U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Procurement and Contracts Branch, Room 2418, Mail Stop O-20, 6432 General Green Way, Alexandria, VA 22312

D -- INTEREST IN OBTAINING INFORMATION POC Office of Information Technology, (202) 942-8800. REQUEST FOR INFORMATION. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is interested in obtaining information from companies which have experience in electronic filing systems, electronic commerce, text management systems, outsourcing, systems and network integration, transactional processing, document management systems, distributed computing, business process reengineering, multimedia, public data networks, the Internet, data communications standards, and workflow software. The SEC intends to incorporate new technologies and, possibly, new processes, in order to augment its current filing system for the electronic receipt, processing and dissemination of securities information filed with or submitted to the agency. The current system, known as the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, can readily accept, parse, store, retrieve, perform full text search on, and disseminate more than 16 million pages of text submitted annually on numerous SEC form types. Respondents are encouraged to offer comments or suggestions on any or all of the subject areas identified herein, and on concepts and technologies not specifically sited which could facilitate the capture, analysis, and dissemination of the financial data the SEC is required to obtain by statute. Responses should be numbered to track to the numbering scheme used herein. THIS IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS (RFP). However, the SEC may use the comments received to develop specifications that may be incorporated into a Request for Proposal at a later date. Following are questions relating to the technical areas for which the SEC is seeking industry comment: 1) Should all, or a portion of EDGAR be privatized? ``Privatization'' is meant to imply not only the use of private funds to construct, operate, and maintain the system, but is intended to extend to legal ownership of the system and system processing as well; 2) Should the entire process of filing with the SEC be structured such that registrants would not be required to transmit filings to the SEC, but would provide the SEC notice that a particular filing document could be retrieved from a corporate computer system, possibly linked to the Internet?; 3) Currently, the SEC maintains an Internet site that contains a complete copy of the public portions of the EDGAR database. Should the agency continue to maintain and operate this service or should this service be provided by the private sector either on the Internet or via some other means?; 4) What practical alternatives exist for submitting documents in formats other than ASCII and how could such alternatives be accomplished on a wide scale?; 5) What are the difficulties and implications of accepting documents in native word processing formats? Is a standardized format for the purposes of acceptance, analysis and dissemination possible?; 6) What would be the implications of using Portable Document Format (PDF)? What technical problems could be expected with respect to text search queries and how could they be overcome?; 7) If documents were accepted in either native word processing format or in PDF format, are there any issues directly affecting the existing SGML data tagging structure?; 8) What would be the implications of requiring documents to be submitted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)?; 9) What approaches are available for adding images to electronic filings? 10) Under the current contract, the SEC uses a commercial service to store SEC documents and provide full text search across 20 million pages for 700 SEC staff. What technologies are available which would permit the SEC to accomplish full text search without having to rely on a specified service provider?; 11) The current EDGAR application for SEC staff is based on custom client-server technology. Are there any office-oriented, off-the-shelf document management software packages the SEC should consider using?; 12) At present, EDGAR document dissemination relies upon a high-speed, real-time distribution subsystem for commercial resellers of SEC information, and a SEC Internet server which is suitable for low-volume users of raw filing data. How should this structure be altered or enhanced to improve access to corporate filings? The SEC is interested in receiving comments by 11/30/95. No solicitation document exists at this time. All responses conforming to the required response format will be reviewed, and the submitter will be placed on the mailing list for all future project undertakings. Corporations and organizations are encouraged to submit corporate and technical information in addition to responses to the numbered questions if such literature's applicability is identified by the submitter by associating the information with the numbered questions. It is likely that the SEC will incorporate innovative approaches and concepts, technically superior components, and cost-effective, readily implemented solutions proffered in response to this Request that facilitate the submission, capture, and analysis of electronically filed securities data, as well as the subsequent dissemination of that data if, as expected, the SEC proceeds with a full-and-open competition through the issuance of a solicitation document. No telephone inquiries will be accepted. MAILING ADDRESS FOR RESPONSE: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Information Technology, EDGAR RFI/MS 0-4, 6432 General Green Way, Alexandria, VA 22312. (300)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0036 19951031\D-0003.SOL)