|
COMMERCE BUSINESS DAILY ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 1,1995 PSA#1464U.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)
D - Automatic Data Processing and Telecommunication Services Index Page
|
|