The provision of research and development and software development and support.

This framework is concerned with the delivery, improvement and support of data services and the creation and maintenance of data solutions for internal and external users. This may involve the creation of new products and services, and/or new or improved methods of producing, delivering and/or supporting products and services. These services, products and solutions may include, but are not limited to: manipulation, interrogation, management and display of information; designing, prototyping, modification, integration and/or data services with or integration into online, web-based or mobile/tablet delivery systems. Information and data may be spatial or textual or, increasingly, a fusion of both.

The Authority aspires to routinely create new data products or services in near real-time. The framework will enable the Authority to move towards its goal of holding data in such a way that it is discoverable to a user with necessary access rights and clearances with a single search and to automatically search for new source data and assess, ingest, meta-tag, store and make available for exploitation.

It is envisaged that development activity that may include short research and development tasks and consultancy and advice services relating to any of the above; but the scope also includes delivery of and migration to final Production systems, or IT software solutions and support thereof.

Outputs from specific Lots may be used to inform requirements and task suppliers under other Lots or other contracts.

Task 1 under the framework is being let at the same time. Detailed requirements are available under Lot 3- Rules Automation and Work-flow for Task 1- Automated Assessment. It should be noted that bidders are free to bid for a place on this Lot without also bidding for Task 1, as the scoring of the Lot and scoring of Task 1 are independent of each other.

Suppliers will be expected to work with the Authority and any other third party supplier the Authority may appoint during the life of the framework agreement.

The Lots are as follows:

Lot 1 Software Development;

Lot 2 Mobile Apps;

Lot 3 Rules Automation and Work-flow

Lot 4 Automated Data Mining, Transformation and Content Generation;

Lot 5 Open Source, Open Standards and Non-Relational Databases;

Lot 6 Data Discovery and Supply.

Further information can be found in the ITT document.