EVS_RFI_Draft_1.pdf

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION/SOURCES SOUGHT NOTICE

National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT)

Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS)

INTRODUCTION

The Department of Interior (DOI) Acquisition Services Directorate (AQD), on behalf of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), is seeking information for market research purposes to determine the availability of qualified Contractors to provide several general types of consulting, planning, process improvement, management, systems, software development, information technology operations, subject matter expertise, and terminology analysis, development, maintenance, publishing, and support services to the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), National Cancer Institute (NCI). These services include, but are not limited to: overall contract and project management and high level coordination among subprojects and tasks; analysis of semantic content and technical aspects of all current EVS resources and many related terminology sources and data standards; working with NCI and community partners to analyze and address their terminology needs; developing recommendations for the EVS Program, including technical and process improvements; and performing the development, modeling, refinement, quality assurance, maintenance, publication, and deployment of EVS scientific, clinical, and administrative terminology resources, tools, and services.

This Request for Information (RFI)/Sources Sought Notice is for market research purposes only.

The information from this market research will assist the Government with acquisition planning.

BACKGROUND

NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS) is a premier NCI terminology and ontology resource.

It provides foundational content, consulting and technical services, and tools to meet NCI and NCI partners’ needs for controlled terminology and terminology standards, and to facilitate data interoperability and support knowledge management technologies across the Institute’s information systems, NIH Centers, federal regulatory agencies, the larger biomedical community, and health care organizations.

NCI EVS (https://evs.nci.nih.gov/) produces, maintains, and publishes multiple semantic products including two major ones: the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt), the core NCI's reference biomedical terminology/ontology containing more than 196000 concepts and more than 2,000 terminology value sets generated according to the requirements of the EVS stakeholders and users, and the NCI Metathesaurus (NCIm), a comprehensive integrated database of 7.1 million terms from 116 source biomedical vocabularies condensed into 2.7 million concepts.

EVS also updated, maintains, and publishes standalone terminology sources, such as, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), The Cancer Medications Enquiry Database (CanMED), Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI), The Human Genome Organization's (HUGO) Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) Terminology, Gene Ontology (GO), Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC), Medication Reference Terminology (MED-RT), The International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology (MedDRA), and multiple cross-terminology mappings.

NCI EVS performs semantic requirements gathering, scientific/biomedical content and technical consultations, and facilitates multi-stakeholder content and technical collaborations and user support to address the broad spectrum of terminology needs of NCI and its partners. The EVS Program encompasses terminology evaluation, science-driven content development and maintenance, and terminology licensing; terminology software evaluation, development, and licensing; terminology publications and downloads through multiple file formats, browsers, and application programming interfaces (APIs).

EVS products and services have been adopted by research institutions, regulatory authorities, data standards development organizations (SDOs), healthcare organizations, and industry as a shared standards development and coding environment, allowing participants to compare and harmonize with each other's content while taking advantage of controlled terminology, ontology, structures, full-text definitions, codes, and other features for effective data interpretation, management, retrieval, sharing, reuse, and knowledge representation.

BUSINESS NEED

EVS currently develops and uses the following specialized terminology tools, which can be found at https://evs.nci.nih.gov/tools and https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/EVS/EVS+Wiki/ .

Endpoints, tools, and applications to support terminology development, searching, metadata and content retrieval for EVS-hosted terminologies, terminology mapping, and semantic support of data harmonization and sharing include:

• NCI Metathesaurus editing tool - Metathesaurus Enhancement and Maintenance Environment (MEME)

• EVS Term Suggestion Application

• EVS Report Writer

• EVS EXPLORE Browser

• NCI Report Exporter

• EVSREST API

• EVS File Transfer Protocol (EVS FTP) site

• EVS Genomic Data Commons (GDC) Metadata Validation Service (EVS GDC MVS)

• EVS Semantic Integration Platform (EVS-SIP)

• Triplestore database containing NCIt and other terminologies (currently in Enterprise

Knowledge Graph Platform Stardog).

Endpoints, techniques, processes, and activities to support semantic content development, conversion, mapping, extension, integration, and harmonization and data standards support include:

• Maintenance, reengineering, and improvement of the EVS Architecture, technologies, and tools;

https://evs.nci.nih.gov/tools https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/EVS/EVS%2BWiki/

• Support of creation, editing, maintenance, processing, updates, and publication services for NCIt;

• Support of creation, editing, maintenance, processing, updates, and publication services for NCIm;

• Support of creation, maintenance, processing, updates, and publication services for cross-terminology mappings;

• Support of processing, updates, maintenance, and publication services for EVS-hosted standalone terminologies, ontologies, and data standards;

• Consulting semantic services and technical coordination of content stakeholders and user communities;

• Implementation of best practices of terminology analysis, development, processing, and semantic representation of scientific and clinical data for data standards adoption and knowledge management support;

• Quality assurance and control of operations, terminology content, tools, and services.

Reference Attachment 1 – NCI EVS Draft SOW for additional details pertaining to this requirement.

PURPOSE

This Request for Information (RFI) is seeking responses from vendors to address the questions outlined in the Section titled “Information Requested.” The Government is looking for a contract source to provide the services and tasks contained in the attached draft Statement of Work.

INFORMATION REQUESTED

1. Identify if your company is one or more of the following business types: Other than small business, small business, small disadvantaged business, 8(a) concern, women-owned small business, economically disadvantaged women-owned small business (EDWOSB) concern, HUBZone, veteran-owned, or service-disabled veteran-owned small business based on the NAICS identified herein.

2. The Government has identified the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code(s) of 541512 “Computer Systems Design Services” for this requirement with a size standard of $34 Million. Please identify any other applicable NAICS codes to this requirement.

3. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in providing clinical/research vocabulary and informatics services as described in the attached draft Statement of Work (SOW).

4. Describe issues faced in the past in providing clinical/research vocabulary and informatics as described in this SOW and how these challenges were overcome.

5. Identify any technical and/or programmatic risks you foresee in executing these requirements. Define risk reduction measures you would employ to address these risks.

6. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in supporting of full cycle development of large-scale controlled terminology and ontology products supporting biomedical research program(s) including terminology creation, editing, maintenance, mapping, publication, and semantic content access, delivery, and distribution services.

7. Provide details on your personnel’s background, subject matter expertise, and experience in semantic support of knowledge management for scientific and clinical data domains including but not limited to diseases with a special focus on clinical, pathologic, and molecular characteristics of neoplasms and associated biologic processes; clinical procedures, treatment, and prevention; molecular biology; radiology and imaging;

biomarkers; genetics, genomics, and clinical genomics; gene products and proteomics;

pharmaceutical products; preclinical, translational, and clinical research; epidemiology, cancer surveillance, and public health.

8. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in initiating and supporting expert terminology working groups focused on the development of harmonized terminology and terminology standards.

9. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in technical operational support and software development to enable controlled terminology data analysis, mapping, integration, and reporting services to include coverage of data quality, utilization, effectiveness, and standards support.

10. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past five years in editing and production of ontology and terminology content using terminology development tools and applications including Protégé and the Metathesaurus Enhancement and Maintenance Environment 5 (MEME5) editing tool environment.

11. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in successfully operating tools and services deployed to the Cloud based infrastructure.

12. Provide details on your company’s expertise and experience within the past three years in successfully operating Representational State Transfer (REST) services, SPARQL querying language, and API(s) development to enable complex data queries.

13. Identify any potential Organizational Conflicts of Interest that may arise in the future.

Outline your organization’s strategies for mitigating any OCI. Clarify how you ensure confidentiality and prevent the misuse of sensitive project information.

14. Identify any information you feel is missing in the draft SOW that would be beneficial to accurately defining and developing your staffing model and costs.

15. Provide available commercial services brochures and/or information providing a description, capabilities, and features of your commercially available services that meet the government’s requirements.

16. Provide the name, telephone number, mailing address, and email address of a point of contact having authority and knowledge to discuss responses with Government representatives.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION

Firms with the capability to provide the requirements referenced herein are invited to submit, in writing, information in accordance with the instructions below. This information should be responsive to the request for information identified above as well as any technical questions, as indicated herein. Submissions for the information must be organized and identifiable per the information in this RFI, e.g. responses to questions are numbered by question and follow the same sequence.

Responses are limited to twelve (12) pages or less. Submissions should be in a Microsoft Office compatible format (i.e., Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) or Adobe Acrobat

A page is defined as an 8.5 inch by 11 inch sheet of paper with no less than one-inch margins on all four sides; All pages shall be single-spaced, single-sided, with a font no less than 10 points for text, tables, and graphics; Spacing before and after the line shall be no less than 3 point; the following page types do NOT count towards the page limitations:

• Section dividers

• Blank pages, which must be marked “This page intentionally left blank”

• Fold-outs shall be counted as the appropriate number of pages based upon an 8.5 inch by

11 inch sheet of paper; partial pages shall be rounded up (e.g., 1.5 pages will be treated as 2 pages.);

Responses are due no later than 10:00 AM ET, November 18, 2024. Submissions shall be submitted via email to Russell Pfeiffer and Victoria Seelhoefer at russell_pfeiffer@ibc.doi.gov and victoria_seelhoefer@ibc.doi.gov. Paper copies will not be accepted. The responses must include the business size of the vendor under NAICS code 541512 including any applicable small business subcategory (Service Disabled-Veteran Owned Small Business, Veteran-Owned Small Business, Women-Owned Small Business, HUBZone Small Business, Small Disadvantaged Small Business, Historically Black College and University/Minority Institution, Small Business Joint Venture, Consortium, Team Partnering, or Other than Small Business).

Offerors should indicate if they would need to subcontract and, if so, for which tasks.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

This RFI is being issued solely for market research information and acquisition planning purposes. It does not constitute a Request for Quote (RFQ) or a promise to issue an RFQ in the future. This RFI does not commit the Government to a contract for any supply or service whatsoever. Furthermore, the Government is not at this time seeking proposals and will not accept unsolicited proposals. Responders are advised that the Government will not reimburse for any information or administrative costs incurred in response to this RFI; all costs associated with responding to this RFI will be solely at the interested parties’ expense. Not responding to this RFI does not preclude participation in a future RFQ, if one is issued. However, interested parties are encouraged to participate in this RFI.

Proprietary information and trade secrets, if any, must be clearly marked on all materials. All information received that is marked Proprietary will be handled accordingly. Please be advised that all submissions become Government property and will not be returned. All Government and contractor personnel reviewing RFI responses will have signed non-disclosure agreements and understand their responsibility for proper use and protection from unauthorized disclosure of proprietary information as described in 41 U.S.C. 423. The Government shall not be held liable for any damages incurred if proprietary information is not properly identified.

No telephone calls will be accepted requesting a bid package or solicitation. There is no bid package or solicitation. In order to protect the procurement integrity of any future procurement, if any, that may arise from this announcement, information regarding technical point of contact will not be given and no appointments for presentations will be made.