** SPECIAL NOTICE ** UPCOMING Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for A Study to Determine Natural Language Processing (NLP) Capabilities with the NCCF Open Knowledge Mesh (KM)

** THIS SPECIAL NOTICE IS STRICTLY FOR INFORMATIONAL USE. IT ALSO SERVES AS ADVANCE NOTICE THAT A FULL BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT (BAA) IS FORTHCOMING. ** NOAA plans to release a Broad Agency Announcement review of advanced technologies for its future planning of the next-generation space architecture. The BAA – and the study that will result – is part of NOAA’s Office of Systems Architecture and Engineering (SAE) Joint Venture Program.

Joint Venture examines the feasibility of partnering with other federal agencies, the academic community, or the commercial sector to develop promising innovative research and technology to meet NOAA’s future observational, product and service needs.

NOAA has identified a need to improve and expand the open discovery, access, use, reproducibility, and trust of its environmental intelligence - both in terms of process and information - in order to facilitate key strategic initiatives, including the advancement of social environmental equity and the enhancement of weather and climate resilience across communities and natural ecosystems.

NOAA and the SAE JV program is requesting the generation, assessment, and delivery to NOAA, of an innovative and meritorious study that examines, delivers, and iteratively demonstrates independently validatable, and working models, features, and capabilities related to the development and management of an enterprise information processing system backed by an interoperable knowledge graph ecosystem (‘knowledge mesh’) of process-contextualized, semantically enabled facts, exposed as a unified access interface (envisioned as foundation model), that is capable of dynamically leveraging Application Programming Interface (APIs) 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.

This BAA will be posted on the federal contracts opportunities website, SAM.GOV. In the BAA, NOAA will be asking for full proposal submissions, which should not exceed ten (10) pages. The agency is planning to conduct an Industry Day to answer any questions related to the BAA. Depending on responses and the availability of funding, NOAA may award zero, one, or multiple study contracts, grants, or interagency agreements as a result of this BAA. The BAA will be open to all industry, Government Labs, and Academia.

Universities, Institutions, and Small Businesses are encouraged to submit their own response, and/or to join other entities as team members in submitting responses to the BAA.

NOTE: This BAA is for the exploration of possibilities for a future state and currently there is no planned mission for NLP/KM.