Office of Patent Information Management (OPIM) Automated Pre-Search

Deadline extended to 12:00pm EST, 8/6/2015 THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) BEING RELEASED PURSUANT TO FEDERAL ACQUISITION REGULATION (FAR) PART 10: MARKET RESEARCH. This RFI is issued solely for informational, market research, and planning purposes only. It does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP) or a promise to issue an RFP in the future. This RFI does not commit the Government to contract for any supply or service whatsoever. Further, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not at this time seeking proposals, and will not accept unsolicited proposals. Respondents are advised that the United States (U.S) Government will not pay for any information or administrative cost incurred in response to this RFI. All costs associated with responding to this RFI will be solely at the responding party's expense. Responses to the RFI will not be returned. Please be advised that all submissions become Government property and will not be returned. Responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the U.S Government to form a binding contract. It is the responsibility of the interested parties to monitor the Federal Business Opportunities (www.fbo.gov) site for additional information pertaining to this RFI. The Government does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this RFI or to otherwise pay for the information solicited. Although the term "offeror" is used in this RFI, your response will be treated as information only and shall not be used as a proposal. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this RFI is to conduct market research to explore available products for an automated pre-search solution on behalf of the USPTO Office of Patent Information Management (OPIM), and to assess vendor capabilities and interest. A Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solution is preferable. As the world's body of knowledge increases and tools expand to access this information, the ability of individuals to review and filter this content is becoming increasing strained. The USPTO is interested in information technology (IT) solutions that can assist in narrowing the broad information base to manageable sizes for more careful individual review. The Government is seeking industry input to assist in identifying features and solutions to meet the requirements specified below: - Ability to continually and incrementally ingest reference disclosures (US Patents and pre-grant Publications, foreign patent abstracts or full text translations, and non-patent literature) provided in HTML or XML by the USPTO to generate a corpus of literature against which automated searches can be performed. - Ability to accept as a search query another document, representing a patent application specification and claims set o If service is provided outside of the USPTO firewall, then the system must be capable of insuring the confidentiality of the search query document - Ability to search automatically without human involvement by using, for example, linguistic analysis, concept searching, bag-of-words, term mapping, and faceting to find relevant results from the corpus - Ability to interface with the IT solution to provide the results through an API (Application Programming Interface) - Ability to present ranked relevant results that best correlate to the search query document o Results can be represented by a listing, a report, combinations with visuals (e.g. charts, diagrams, maps) o Results should include supplemental information such as quantified relevance (e.g. 90% relevant), Quantified divergence from corpus (e.g. query document is in the 2nd standard deviation from corpus facet), or other information offerer deems pertinent to expressing search relevance/accuracy The overall intent is for automated pre-search to provide a useful prior art baseline for patent examiners that represents the current state of technology for each patent application. "Prior art" is defined as all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent application's claims of originality. Instructions for RFI Responses: Responses must be submitted electronically to the Contracting Officer, Douglas Reed, at douglas.reed@uspto.gov. Please list "Capability Statement - RFI USPTO-DHR-201502" in subject line of e-mail. No phone calls please. Respondents must submit their responses via email in .pdf format no later than Thursday, 7/23/2015 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST). The response should be no more than 30 pages in length (inclusive of charts, graphs, screenshots, and pictures) and no larger than 9 megabytes and should use font size 11 or larger. Proprietary information submitted in response to this RFI will be protected from unauthorized disclosure as required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). All proprietary markings should be clearly delineated. The respondent shall identify where data is restricted by proprietary or other rights and mark it accordingly. Format for RFI Responses: The format for the RFI responses is described below: Cover page: the cover page shall contain (1) Company name, (2) Primary and Alternate Points of Contact, (3) Phone Numbers and Email Addresses, (4) DUNS Number, (5) Primary NAICS Code/Federal Supply Code (FSC), (6) Corresponding Business Size (i.e. Large Business, Small Business, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, Veteran Owned Small Business, Woman Owned Small Business, Small Disadvantaged Business, HUBZone Business, or 8(a) Small Business), and (7) Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) or other GWAC Contract Number, if applicable. Introduction: Provide a brief description of existing capability to meet the requirements contained herein. Technical Capability: The respondent shall validate the capabilities of the product solution described under "Objective." Organization Experience/Past Performance: Provide a brief description of your organization's experience in same or similar services and/or product solution(s) to both commercial and government organizations. Clarification of RFI Responses: To fully comprehend the information contained within a response to this RFI, there may be a need to seek further clarification from those vendor(s) identified as capable. This clarification will be requested from the Contracting Officer in the form of an electronic communication; and/or a request for a presentation/demonstration of the response to a specific USPTO group or groups. The USPTO reserves the right to seek additional information from those vendors identified with unique solutions that are determined to be beneficial to the USPTO.