MOD Request for Information (RFI) - Army Operational Legacy Branch (AOLB) Archive digitisation Proof of Concept (PoC)

The Army Operational Legacy branch (AOLB) in collaboration with the Defence Artificial intelligence Centre (DAIC) would like to develop a proof of concept (PoC) for a fully searchable electronic archive of the material store.

The material located within the store is of varying age, format, and condition. A sample of 2000 documents are being digitised for this PoC and a software solution is now required to provide robust search and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality over the digitised documents and their metadata to meet legal standards. The digital archive must be searchable to a degree of accuracy that meets the ISO 10002 and legal obligations of the MOD to disclose all relevant records pertaining to an inquest or investigation.

A generic capability is sought that supports both filtering on metadata and search over textual document content. No other criteria is defined to allow for creativity during the PoC but is should be noted that accuracy is paramount - false positives are preferable over missing relevant documents. The software will be tested against current processes to evaluate its performance and suitability.

The MOD would like to invite industry to provide feedback on the following questions:

1. Do you have a COTS product, or can you develop a MOTS solution that can demonstrably search across the provided dataset?

2. What is your licensing model, with costs?

3. Can the solution be deployed to run standalone in a secure environment and guaranteed to run on UK servers only or is it dependent on public cloud resources?

4. Do you have Security Cleared (SC) individuals within your organisation?

Your response should be sent to the Contracting Authority email address as detailed in this RFI (Jon.Burt111@mod.gov.uk). Your response should be sent in Microsoft Word format. Please note that the MOD Gateway will only accept emails less than 60MB in size.