Overview and Status of the Joint Venture Partnerships Program Broad Agency Announcement - Natural Language Processing (NLP) Capabilities with the NCCF Open Knowledge Mesh

In May 2024, NOAA announced the release of a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to review the capability and feasibility of deploying advanced technologies to expand the discovery, access, and use of environmental intelligence for the purposes of social environmental equity and enhancing weather and climate resilience.

NOAA has undertaken these studies after recognizing the need to improve and expand use, reproducibility, and trust in its systems and information to inform weather and climate decision-making. This BAA represents, in part, a follow-on to the Earth Observation Digital Twin BAA released in September 2022.

The studies carried out by this BAA are intended to examine, deliver, and demonstrate working models, features, and capabilities related to the development and management of an enterprise information processing system. This system will be backed by an interoperable knowledge graph ecosystem, or “knowledge mesh,” of process contextualized, semantically enabled facts. The system will use the knowledge mesh for the purpose of answering highly contextual queries from a number of personas representing a diverse swath of NOAA users.

Contracts were awarded to this study between September and October 2024. The authors of this presentation will present an overview of the work and updates on the study progress.

The studies are part of NOAA’s System Architecture and Engineering office (SAE) Joint Venture Partnership. Joint Venture Partnership examines the feasibility of partnering with other federal agencies, the academic community, or the commercial sector to develop promising innovative research and technology to meet NOAA’s future observational, product and service needs.