NASA LaRC Solicitation: Virtual Panel of Experts for Vehicle Design Development of Ontologies
Synopsis/Solicitation Combo – Jun 08, 2011
On-Line RFQ – Posted on Jun 08, 2011
STATEMENT OF WORK – Posted on Jun 08, 2011
General Information
Solicitation Number: NNL11392509Q
Posted Date: Jun 08, 2011
FedBizOpps Posted Date: NAIS only
Recovery and Reinvestment Act Action: No
Original Response Date: Jun 17, 2011
Current Response Date: Jun 17, 2011
Classification Code: A — Research and Development
NAICS Code: 927110 – Space Research and Technology
Set-Aside Code: Total Small Business
Contracting Office Address
NASA/Langley Research Center, Mail Stop 12, Industry Assistance Office, Hampton, VA 23681-0001
Description
NASA/LaRC has a requirement for Virtual Panel of Experts for Vehicle Design (Development of Omntologies) per the attached statement of work. Qty: One (1) Job. The ststement or works are linked above or may be accessed at http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/bizops.cgi?gr=C&pin= . ]
This notice is a combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with the format in FAR Subpart 12.6, as supplemented with additional information included in this notice. This announcement constitutes the only solicitation, which is issued as a Request for Quotation (RFQ); quotes are being requested and a written solicitation will not be issued. Offerors are required to use the On-Line RFQ system to submit their quote. The On-line RFQ system is linked above or it may be accessed at http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/bizops.cgi?gr=C&pin= . The information required by FAR Subpart 12.6 is included in the on-line RFQ.
The Government intends to acquire a commercial item using FAR Part 12 and the Simplified Acquisition Procedures set forth in FAR Part 13.
Questions regarding this acquisition must be submitted in writing (e-mail is preferred) no later than 06/15/2011. It is the quoter’s responsibility to monitor this site for the release of amendments (if any). Potential quoters will be responsible for downloading their own copy of this notice, the on-line RFQ and amendments (if any).
An ombudsman has been appointed – See NASA Specific Note “B”.
Any referenced notes may be viewed at the following URLs link below.
Point of Contact
Name: Delores Powell
Title: Contractor Support Buyer
Phone: 757-864-2437
Fax: 757-864-7709
Email: delores.j.powell@nasa.gov
Name: Sandra S Ray
Title: Contract Support Buyer
Phone: 757-864-1572
Fax: 757-864-7709
Email: sandra.s.ray@nasa.gov
Statement of Work for the Virtual Panel of Experts (VPE) for Vehicle Design (Development of Ontologies)
Background: The proposed effort will support the LaRC Center Innovation Fund effort entitled “Collaboration Environment Based on Digital Ecosystems Enhanced with a Virtual Panel of Experts (VPE).” The primary focus will be to provide an underlying layer of semantic knowledge to the VPE by constructing a domain-specific collection of scientific documents that has been semantically enriched with domain knowledge. In addition to the domain specific knowledge, general information and data, such as physical constants, geographical, political, and economic data will be included in the VPE. The methodology for knowledge base construction will be generated in such a manner as to facilitate inclusion of new scientific documents and knowledge into the design environment.
The documents that make up the body of knowledge in a domain and the ontologies that provide the semantic makeup of the domains are brought together to form the knowledge bases using semantic web applications such as Composer and Ensemble from the TopBraid Suite. The VPE will access the semantically rich knowledge bases through another semantic application such as TopBraid Composer. The benefits of the semantic enrichment of the underlying knowledge base will help solve several long-standing problems in knowledge retrieval. Linking text segments with conventional statistical measures of similarity may result in false links when the same words are used in different contexts. In addition, linking text segments with conventional statistical measures of similarity misses segments that have similar meanings but with no words in common.
The Contractor shall perform the following tasks:
Task 1. Select a design domain to use for demonstration
After discussions with potential users of the VPE, select a domain to use for demonstration purposes that is representative of vehicle design work that will be performed in the collaboration environment. The amount of available documents and existing ontologies will influence the selection.
Task 2. Collect, modify, and devise ontologies for the design domain and its disciplines
There are a large number of freely available ontology collections in a variety of scientific domains. For example, NASA JPL has developed the SWEET collection of publicly available ontologies. The Protege project at Stanford University also maintains a large library of user-contributed ontologies. In addition, OpenCyc, the open source version of an extremely large general knowledge ontology and common sense reasoning engine, is available. Ontologies shall be modified or created using several available tools such as Protege and TopBraid Composer.
Task 3. Collect and process existing documents in the design domain using the ontologies.
Based on the scientific domain chosen, a large portion of the available documents within that domain shall be collected.
The documents shall be analyzed, using the ontologies previously generated, to discover and connect semantically similar knowledge elements. The project shall use recently introduced available tools, such as TopBraid Composer, for connecting data sources, designing queries, rules, and semantic data processing chains, and combining all of the knowledge sources into an accessible knowledge base. Generate Resource Description Framework (RDF) schemas, relating semantically similar components of the knowledge base, using SPARQL, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard query language. This methodology shall be developed in a manner that ensures that any new knowledge that becomes available in the future can easily be added to the semantically rich knowledge base and made available to the VPE.
This project will adhere to standards published by the W3C Semantic Web working group. These standards include www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Main_Page. These will be provided by the Government upon request. RDF Schema, the OWLWeb Ontology Language and the SPARQL Query Language available at Deliverables:
Ontologies developed specifically during this project. They shall be delivered in the standard OWL Web Ontology Language.
Final version of the VPE demonstration code.
