Ontology Visualisation

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done It is important for an organisation as complex as Highways England to understand the nature and structure of the data that we manage and use in the construction, maintenance, and operation of the Strategic Road Network. We have a complex and ever-changing IT estate. To make systemic improvements we need the components of our IT estate to share common data definitions. This will allow us to provide users with a semantic layer to interact with so that they can make data-driven decisions without needing to understand the underlying complexity. Our investment in our ontology and data architecture seeks to build a consistent, flexible, and future-proof means to map out our data entities, their definitions and relationships, and is available to view here: https://webprotege.stanford.edu/#projects/0b3be685-73bd-4d5a-b866-e70d0ac7169b/edit/Classes It is also increasingly important for organisations such as HE to be able to exchange information with other infrastructure owners and operators using standard conventions (see the Centre for Digital Built Britain’s ‘Towards an Information Management Framework’ report: https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/news/pathway-towards-IMF ). Problem to Be Solved To date we have built our Ontology through extensive engagement with our wider business, and review of our own literature. The existing toolset- Stanford University’s WebProtégé online platform- is relatively good at allowing experienced users to build .owl ontology files. However, ontologies quickly become sizeable and dense as entities and relationships are added, and WebProtégé provides only limited functionality to help users visualise, filter, or explore parts of the ontology. This limits the usefulness of the ontology to the business. It makes the outputs inaccessible to non-technical users, which limits our ability to review and develop the ontology in collaboration with the wider organisation. It also limits the usefulness of the ontology for the purposes of system design, by preventing solution architectures from quickly visualising the subset of the ontology that is relevant to a particular project or solution. Finally, whilst WebProtégé is, as the name suggests, web-based, it is an academic product, placing necessary constraints on the speed of the solution, making access to the ontology somewhat clunky, and meaning that or work is dependent on the on-going funding of a project by a foreign academic institution. Who Are the Users As a business user I need to be able to view and filter the ontology to visualise the data entities, relationships, and definitions that pertain to a business process, use case, or area of interest. Filtering, in this context, means reducing the number of data entities and relationships visualised using criteria such as: - Showing only data entities within n steps of one or more data entities; - Showing only relationships of a type (we currently have ‘affects’, ‘operation of’, ‘properties’ and ‘is affected by’ as our relationship types); - Showing the paths between two data entities; - Showing only data entities with a property (for example a specific tag); - All of the above. For example, if I am working on a CRM system, I may wish to see all data entities that have a relationship with the ‘Customer’ and ‘Stakeholder’ data entities. I may then filter to only show ‘operation of’ relationships. The visualisation should be clear, legible, and aesthetically appealing, preferably using open source tools such as d3 (or potentially proprietary tools like Neo4j). This should all be possible using Highways England standard locked down laptops without the need to install any additional software. Early Market Engagement Work Already Done We have made substantial investment in our data management infrastructure using the Microsoft Azure cloud. This has included development of an ontology and methodology for data architecture. For extensive background information please visit (you will need to request access, please reference ‘Ontology Visualisation’ in that request) https://highways.sharepoint.com/sites/DaaS/SitePages/Home.aspx Existing Team The winning bidder will need to work alongside our incumbent data platform supplier (BJSS Ltd., and the broader CDO team). Current Phase Alpha Work Location Highways England, Woodlands, Manton Lane, Bedford, MK41 7LW. Working Arrangments Our business is located across the whole of England and so are our teams and suppliers. We would expect our supplier to work flexibly and be mobile when required, but also support remote working and the utilisation of collaboration tools. Security Clearance We expect all our suppliers to have BPSS as a minimum. Additional T&Cs Skills & Experience Data Architecture Ontology Web App Development Graph visualisation (e.g. d3, Neo4j, Gephi or similar) Microsoft Azure Data standards for Digital Twin and BIM Support documentation, training, and handover Web App Testing, CI/CD Agile Project Management Nice to Haves No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria Technical Solution Approach and methodolgy Team Structure Risks and dependencies Value for money Cultural Fit Criteria How do you make data and ontologies accessible to non-technical staff? How do you make your solutions user-friendly? How do you help to create capability in the organisations you work with? How do we learn to use your solution, and how can we make best use of it? How do you excite and engage non-technical staff? How do you excite and engage IT staff? (e.g. solution architects, enterprise architects, service delivery managers, etc.) Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method Case study Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 20% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers No questions have been answered yet Budget range maximum spend £280,000.