D -- Notice of intent to negotiate a sole source contract with Open Source Project For A Network Data Access Protocol (OPENDAP)

Notice of intent to negotiate a sole source contract withOPENDAP for the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab/Ocean Climate Research Division (OCRD). Purpose of proposed contract is to extend the OPeNDAP Data Access Protocol to utilize XML and to be accessible as a SOAP Web Service definition. The OPeNDAP Data Access Protocol is widely utilized in by ocean/atmospheric/climate data management system developers. The upgrade of OPeNDAP to support the modern "XML" standards for data encodings is essential for this protocol to achieve interoperability with other systems within the data management community. High levels of complexity and the coexistence of many protocols (CORBA, Java/RMI, ADDE, OPeNDAP) are fundamental to the nature of modern data networking; interoperability is the key ingredient required to integrate the multiple network protocols into seamless data delivery systems. The software developers at OPeNDAP (James Gallagher and Dan Holloway) are the original authors of the protocol and have been maintaining and enhancing it since its original development in 1993. This is a simplified acquisition with an estimated value of less than $50,000.