Q and A Ontology Solicitation.pdf

Questions & Answers Solicitation No. NIST-RFQ-22-7300936

Software Tool Services to Support Open Ontology Standard Development Release

1. Is there an incumbent?

No, there is not an incumbent.

2. What vehicle will this use?

This is an open market procurement.

3. Are we able to meet with the Stakeholders or Program Managers?

No, interested contractors may not meet with stakeholders or program managers during the acquisition process.

4. What specific behaviors in Protégé undermine the objectives?

NIST has determined that there are challenges in Protégé with the following items that are not acceptable for NIST requirements: reorganizing/reordering content, adding comments, removing ENTITY declarations, declaring a default namespace, replacing all prefixed resource identifiers with the expanded IRIs, altering literal value syntax, storing changes to an ontology in the wrong file within an import hierarchy.

5. The SOW states a requirement of a bachelor’s degree + 15 years’ ontology development experience for a Knowledge Representation Specialist. May we substitute some of these years for software/data engineering experience and/or higher education like master’s degrees in a related field?

Yes, some substitutions are acceptable as detailed below. The Statement of Work has been revised to include this information.

A Master’s degree in a field closely related to knowledge representation, such as data science or linguistics, may be substituted for up to three of the required years of experience in ontology development and application. A PhD in a field closely related to knowledge representation may be substituted for up to five of the required years of experience in ontology development and application.

Up to five of the required years of experience in ontology development and application may be substituted by data engineering/software engineering experience if it pertained to a multistakeholder environment such as standards development, enterprise data architecting, or enterprise integration architecture.

Regardless of the above acceptable substitutions, a minimum of five years of experience specific to ontology development and application is required.

6. Is information associated with non-contractual work acceptable for past performance?

Any prior work for which 1) reference information for the receiving party is available and 2) the experience is pertinent to this requirement may be considered for past performance. In the event no past performance is available, a quoter will be rated “neutral” for that evaluation factor.

7. The RFQ states that the contract is anticipated to be fixed price. We would like to know whether there will be milestone payments against the deliverables listed in the SOW, Section 7, Deliverables.

Yes, Quoters may propose milestone payments associated with deliverables in the proposed payment schedule required as part of their quotations.

8. It is our assumption from the solicitation that the Contractor is required to host, support, and maintain the ontology engineering infrastructure. Is this correct?

Please see changes to the Statement of Work attached which detail maintenance and hosting service requirements.

9. Will the Government consider including an option period for ongoing maintenance and support, including hosting support for the infrastructure, in the requirement?

No, this requirement is only for the tasks and one-year period of performance identified in the Statement of Work.