Description
The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Eastern Region Acquisitions Division-Kansas City office intends to award, on a sole source basis, under the authority of FAR 13.106-1(b)(1), with the Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) Innovation Centre, 2300 McKenzie Ave, Victoria, BC Canda, for Oceans 2.0 hardware, software, and support for the Office of Ocean Exploration and Research in Silver Spring, MD. A Sources Sought notice was posted on July 12, 2016 and closed on July 22, 2016. No responses were received. Background The NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer is uniquely equipped with a high bandwidth satellite connection and a suite of collaboration tool referred to as telepresence technology . NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) leverages this technology to capitalize on a worldwide team of volunteer researchers operating on shore while the ship is at sea to provide a multidisciplinary team to explore the deep ocean. The shore based scientists advise the ship'screw about expedition planning and provide scientific observations especially in form of organism identification and other annotations of underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) video . It is imperative that OER capture these observations in real time in an indexed and searchable database. The current means of collecting data is inadequate. The upgraded system and new features must be in place before 2017 or NOAA will lose valuable data and OER's mission to provide the highest quality of baseline data to the nation will be compromised. To ensure NOAA collects the highest quality of data during Okeanos Explorer Expeditions OER requires an integrated data collection, database system that also provides post cruise data access capabilities. This system must be web based and capable of being accessed from numerous geographical locations simultaneously. The Oceans 2.0 software and hardware suite enables users to interact with massive video datasets composed of numerous data types and provide a real time and post cruise annotation capability and is the only solution on the market worldwide that can provide all these services and be ready for field deployment on board the Okeanos Explorer before 2017. This state of the art software and hard ware will allow the data collection team aboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to interact with massive video datasets composed of numerous data types and provide a real time and post cruise annotation capability onboard and onshore in respect to the video data collected . Sole Source Justification ONC is a not-for profit organization, established by the University of Victoria to manage and enhance the VENUS and NEPTUNE observatories. VENUS and NEPTUNE represent over $200M in capital investment, and support transformative, multidisciplinary research in coastal and deep ocean environments whose applications shed light on ocean processes and their impacts on a global scale. Since its inception, ONC has also expanded to include observatories in the Arctic Ocean, expanded systems along the west coast of Canada, community volunteer ship data collection systems, coastal radars, ferry-based observations, and autonomous systems. A key aspect of ONC that stands out from other systems operating today is the sophisticated interface for users (Oceans 2.0), including the ability to interact with specific instruments, download data in a variety of formats, explore visual and acoustic data sets, and create a variety of plots and images. Oceans 2.0 features data and information for the public, scientists and educators. Users access ONC using the Oceans 2.0 data management and archive system over the Internet using a web portal, web services, or pre-programmed retrievals. The three main components of Oceans 2.0 include (i) Seascribe - a web based real-time annotation system, (ii) SeaTube - a web based video delivery, post cruise annotation system and (iii) Several plotting and visualizations tools to plot oceanographic data collected during ROV expeditions. Although built originally for observatories, the use of these tools has been successfully expanded to ship based operations. Being web-based, these tools are especially useful for telepresence enabled expeditions, similar to NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, where most of data users (public and scientists) are based on shore. Oceans 2.0 provides the capability for the 24/7 acquisition of high volumes of extremely diverse data, data quality control and calibration, storage, visualization and access by a global audience, as well as providing a convenient interface to handle otherwise complex tasks associated with the remote monitoring and control of the ROV operations. Oceans 2.0 is able to manage the vast amount of data produced, and users can mine the live and archived data streams, to detect trends, classify content and extract features, feeding the results back into the master database, thereby turning raw data into usable information and setting the stage to allow the information to be transformed into knowledge. There are no alternative sources for this software. This software is proprietary to ONC and no other software can perform the specialized functions extensively tailored to video data analysis that are configured for distributed web based access and hardened for at sea operations. No other company can make modifications to the software or offer subscription services for this proprietary software package.