DHS CBP - Air, Land, and Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative - MRAS

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), through the General Services Administration (GSA), is conducting market research to support its mission of enhancing national security and resiliency. This initiative is part of DHS's broader commitment to leveraging advanced technologies to address emerging threats. Specifically, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plays a pivotal role in this mission by integrating customs, immigration, border security, and agricultural protection into a cohesive framework. The CBP aims to prevent the entry of terrorists and their weapons into the United States while facilitating lawful international travel and trade. To achieve these objectives, the Enterprise Analytic Division (EAD) within CBP is at the forefront of transforming operational data into actionable insights, thereby supporting decision-makers with reliable and reproducible data-driven insights.

The Air, Land, and Maritime Domain Awareness (ALMDA) Initiative seeks to unify CBP's situational awareness capabilities across all operational environments air, land, and sea using ontology-enabled knowledge engineering. The project will develop a scalable semantic architecture that supports data integration, decision support, and operational coordination through a multi-domain knowledge graph and shared vocabulary system. This effort aims to address challenges related to heterogeneous data reasoning by improving model fidelity through applied ontology approaches. By doing so, it will enhance decision support on enterprise challenges such as mass migration.

Over the years, DHS has developed numerous information systems designed for specific needs within its components or headquarters. However, these systems often suffer from limited interoperability due to inconsistent semantic frameworks across their underlying data sets. Ontologies offer a promising solution by providing structured knowledge representation systems that facilitate interoperability and automated reasoning across various domains within DHS components. These ontologies create a common understanding of domain-specific concepts and relationships while reducing ambiguity in communication between people and machines.

The ALMDA Initiative represents an opportunity for organizations with expertise in developing ontologies conformant with standards like Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Common Core Ontology (CCO). The work involves creating scalable knowledge graphs capable of integrating disparate data sources while maintaining semantic consistency across different domains within DHS operations. Respondents are expected to demonstrate their experience in developing OWL-RDF ontologies; ensuring semantic interoperability; validating ontologies against Decision Support Questions; handling data ingestion from heterogeneous sources; creating Canonical Controlled Vocabularies; aligning vocabularies with industry standards; integrating AI models with ontology systems; ensuring compliance with government security requirements; managing risks effectively during complex projects; measuring success metrics for implementations; deploying ontology-based inferences effectively using reasoning engines among other responsibilities outlined in this solicitation request.