D -- SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Notice Date

January 4, 2001

Contracting Office

USDA, ARS, NPA, 1201 Oakridge Drive, Suite 150, Fort Collins, CO 80525-5562

ZIP Code

80525-5562

Solicitation Number

RFQ 07-82HW-01

Point of Contact

Fax to Stewart Penrod, Procurement Assistant, (970) 229-5531

Description

The USDA, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with the University of South Carolina (USC) for the development of cooperating, intelligent software agents. USC is the only known source capable of fulfilling the requirement. The following is a summary of the statement of work: The USDA, ARS, US Meat Animal Research Center, Clay Center, Nebraska has a requirement to establish a system of cooperating, intelligent software agents that will: (1) automate the process of constructing genetic linkage maps, (2) manage sequence from automated DNA sequencers, and (3) automate the process of building comparative maps between the human and mouse maps and the maps of cattle, sheep, and swine developed by ARS. These three tasks are currently performed by (expert) scientific personnel using a variety of techniques, information sources, and computer programs. These tasks are time consuming and are susceptible to errors because of the manual operations that are performed. Since data may contain errors and since much of the information is derived from statistical techniques, judgements and inferences must be made by the expert performing these tasks. As it is currently envisioned, each user, each information resource, and each analysis program would be represented by an agent. Each information resource agent would be able to monitor the resource, for example, to note the insertion of new data relevant to a particular genome map. Each analysis agent would be able to control its analysis program, be able to pass data to the program, and be able to accept results from the program. User agent would act autonomously on behalf of the user and should communicate with the user on a global, semantic level shielding the user from having to possess detailed knowledge of any information resource or any analysis program. Communication between agents should be based on reasonably standard language such as KQLM. Some agent will need to exhibit properties of an expert system. Ideally, the user interface to agents would be Java applets accessible through a standard web browser. Agents should have a high degree of platform independence and systems of agents should have the capability of being decentralized across multiple platforms. It should be possible to add agents representing new information resources or new analysis programs to the system dynamically. UNIX based agents are preferred. Agents must be able to interface with Oracle. ARS personnel will identify data resources, identify or develop analysis programs, provide the computer hardware upon which the software will run at the ARS location, and provide the scientific knowledge required to build the ontologies. The contractor will provide the software and documentation for its installation, use and maintenance. The contractor will demonstrate and train ARS personnel in the use of the software. The intended use of this software system is to provide an architecture under which application domain ontologies may be specified and software agents may be built and deployed on a perpetual basis. ARS and the contractor will jointly build ontologies, agents, and user interface. Expected performance period is one year. Evaluation factors for the award of the contract are: (1) Technical capabilities of software building and deploying systems of intelligent software agents (to include the probability that this software can be successfully adapted to this project); (2) Experience of the offeror using this software in previous projects (to include number, quality, and difficulty of past projects); and (3) cost.

Record

Loren Data Corp. 20010108/DSOL001.HTM (W-004 SN50A1G4)