On Sept. 13, NOAA awarded Knowledge Mesh/Natural Language Processing (KM/NLP) contracts with a cumulative value of $5.4 million to four companies:
- Booz Allen Hamilton, of McLean, Va., for $1,084,718.69, with a 12 month period of performance;
- Element 84 Inc., of Alexandria, Va., for $1,195,618, with a 24 month period of performance;
- Noblis Inc., of Reston, Va., for $1,203,452, with a 15 month period of performance; and
- Orion Space Solutions, an Arcfield Company, of Louisville, Colo., for $2,036,930, with a 24 month period of performance.
These awards are to examine, deliver, and iteratively demonstrate working models, features, and capabilities related to the development and management of an enterprise information processing system, backed by a knowledge mesh of process contextualized, semantically enabled facts that is capable of dynamically leveraging Application Programming Interface (APIs). Further, using the knowledge mesh capability for the purpose of answering highly contextual queries from a number of personas representing a diverse swath of NOAA users. In part, this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) represents an idealized follow-on to the Earth Observation Digital Twin (EO-DT) BAA.
These contracts will explore the development of techniques for future applications, but they are not an operational mission or associated with an operational mission. The scope of work supported by this BAA is exploratory in nature.
NOAA completed the award on Sept. 13, following a competitive solicitation that resulted in 27 proposal submissions, and a thorough evaluation of the solutions received.
The contracts are managed by the Joint Venture Partnerships program, which is a program of the Office of Systems Architecture and Engineering, NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
For additional information, please see: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/noaa-study-new-technologies-enhancing-environmental-intelligence