[Federal Register Volume 60, Number 28 (Friday, February 10, 1995)]
[Notices]
[Pages 7938-7939]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 95-3365]



=======================================================================
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY


 Sources Sought for Advanced Information Technologies and New 
Information and Data Sources

AGENCY: Central Intelligence Agency.

ACTION: Notice of Government/Industry Conference.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY: To expand their knowledge of vendor capabilities and to open 
communication 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 Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), among others, will 
sponsor a government-industry conference in May or June 1995 in the 
Washington, DC area. The purpose of the 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 five years are 
beyond the scope of this meeting. Interested private and public sector 
organizations are invited to submit proposal 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 U.S. 
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:

Interest Areas

Technical Infrastructure for Information Distribution

Security
    * Fire-walls and secure protocols
    * Assurance for simultaneous connection of a single workstation to 
classified and unclassified networks (R&D to permit a policy 
determination)
    * Products that prevent data-driven attacks
    * Protection for transfer of sensitive information via the Internet 
(e.g., credit card, limited proprietary data)
    * Encryption on the Internet
    * Monitoring unauthorized access attempts
Communications (Telecommunications and Networking)
    * Wireless communications
    * Enabling devices that operate in a carrier's geographic coverage 
area

--Technology to support tariffs and billing
--Capabilities beyond existing switching technology
--Technology to resolve regulatory issues

    * Technology to connect wireless to terrestrial systems
    * Bandwidth to transmit multimedia information
    * Compression technologies for multimedia delivery
    * Electronic billing via Internet
    * Audiovisual (video conference) technology, including file sharing 
during sessions

Information Collection/Acquisition/Discovery/Retrieval

    ``Smart'' search techniques for automation-aided information 
retrieval
    * Gateways and directory navigation (``pull technologies'') 
operating over a WAN

--Information locators worms, web crawlers, etc.
--Intelligence software agents (knowbots, drones, ``probots'' 
{proactive knowbots}, etc.)
--Knowledge discovery to extract implicit, previously unknown, and 
potentially useful information from data

    <bullet> Dependency detection
    <bullet> Analysis of changes
    <bullet> Detection of anomalies

--Data summarization
--Clustering, (i.e., grouping of related items for browsing of 
multimedia data, (e.g. images, video)

    * Navigating and searching across distributed, multiple 
heterogeneous databases
    * Presentation of integrated result sets of heterogeneous data 
types
[[Page 7939]]

Information Processing (Post-[Retrieval, Pre-analysis] Processing)

Conversion/Integration Technologies
    * Hardcopy conversion concept of operations
    * Data fusion, integration (text, data, images) and presentation
    * Automatic generation of metadata (i.e., data about data) and 
other automation-aided indexing
    * Media conversion (microfiche to electronic form, using scanning 
and OCR)
    * Tagging (e.g., SGML) of multi-media (especially images) data
    * Integration of geographic information systems (GIS) technology
    * Scanning technology--OCR and other
    * Multi-lingual OCR with high accuracy for poor print and copy test
    * Automated correction tools for OCR errors for multiple languages

--Tools using syntax, linguistics, and grammars
--Lexicons for spell checking and keyword extraction in specialized 
areas of interest
Machine Translation
    * Machine-aided translation
    * Translation of languages (other than Russian, German, Romance)
    Document management in a full-text electronic (digital library) 
environment, including input, storage, retrieval, and dissemination.
    * ``Push'' technologies
    * Publishing (including multi-media authoring and presentation)
    * CD-ROM production (low-cost, in-house, one copy)
    * Multi-format support (conversion technologies)
    * Compound documents
    * Client/server compatibility
    * Support for object technology (including object linking and 
embedding capabilities)
    * Archiving
    * Massive digital data storage (optical disk and other technology)
    * Compression technologies for multimedia products
    * Workflow management

Exploitation Tools for Production/Analysis/Use

    Tools sets and capabilities
    * Scalability (upwards in terms of volume and complexity of 
material) for current profiling tools, retrieval, and filtering 
algorithms
    * Hardware for advance visualization, summarization, or input
    * Intergrating visualization tools with language-based tools
    * Robust speech and language understanding technology
    * User-friendly/GUI interfaces and human-computer interfaces for 
all of the above exploitation technologies
    * Natural language understanding, especially to extract names, 
places, and relationships
    * Natural language queries in English on foreign language databases 
(response in English)

Sources of Information and Data

    There is also interest in expanding the acquisition and utilization 
of open source 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:
    * National, bilateral, and multi-lateral economic trends and 
activities
    * National political events and organizations
    * Environmental developments and governments actions
    * Scientific and technology developments and breakthroughs
    * Military and security forces organizations, capabilities and 
locations
    * National infrastructures (air, land, sea, communications)
    * Industries and their products/customers
    * 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.

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 multi-media 
environment, providing intermediary information processing services, 
and using the information for analysis/research, support to policy and 
decision makers, and operations.
    If you are interested, send two abstracts of your offerings with a 
set of three to six key terms or phrases that categorize your 
presentation or exhibit subject. You should use the phrases listed 
above in the noted interest areas or offer additional, but relevant 
concepts. With the abstract sent two copies of more detailed 
descriptions of offerings including duplicate copies of attachment 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 15 March 1995.
    Depending on the responses received, the length of the meeting, and 
the specific session structure will be determined. All respondents will 
be contracted as the planning of the conference proceeds.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Paul F. Wallner, Deputy Director, 
Community Open Source Program Office, Central Intelligence Agency, 
Washington, DC 20505; Telephone: (703) 281-8920.

    Approved: February 6, 1995.
Frank J. Ruocco,
Deputy Director for Administration.
[FR Doc. 95-3365 Filed 2-9-95; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 6310-02-M