GSA AWARDS CONTRACT TO AT&T BUSINESS SERVICES FOR FIRSTGOV'S NEW SEARCH ENGINE.The U.S. General Services Administration The General Services Administration (GSA) was established by section 101 of the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 (40 U.S.C.A. § 751). The GSA sets policy for and manages government property and records. (GSA (1) (Global mobile Suppliers Association, Sawbridgeworth, U.K., www.gsacom.com) A membership organization of suppliers of GSM products and services. Its goal is to promote GSM as the worldwide mobile communications standard. See GSM Association and GSM. ) has awarded a contract to AT&T Business Services for the new FirstGov.gov search engine. AT&T will use the FAST Search and Transfer search engine to search over 51 million pages of federal and state government information. The contract is for a period of one year plus four one-year options to renew. The value of the contract is approximately $2 million a year. The scalability of the FAST Search and Transfer platform will allow FirstGov to rapidly expand the number of websites it spiders from Federal, State, and local governments. In addition to being able to search HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. pages, citizens will be able to search government databases, PDF (Portable Document Format) The de facto standard for document publishing from Adobe. On the Web, there are countless brochures, data sheets, white papers and technical manuals in the PDF format. documents and other file formats. In the future, citizens will be able to request search results to be displayed by category, subject and agency. The configurability and support for Web services (1) Loosely, any online service delivered over the Web. Such usage appears in articles from non-technical sources, but not in IT-oriented publications, because definition #2 below describes the correct use of the term. offered by this platform will allow FirstGov affiliates to seamlessly integrate with FirstGov search services. This contract is a commercial item acquisition and the result of a full and open competition. Proposal evaluation was conducted by a cross-agency team that included representatives from the GSA, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce and independent third party experts. FirstGov is the U.S. Government's official gateway to online government transactions, services and information. During 2001, FirstGov received 50 million hits. This interagency in·ter·a·gen·cy adj. Involving or representing two or more agencies, especially government agencies. initiative is managed by the U.S. General Services Administration. For the past 18 months, the Federal Search Foundation has provided the search engine, at no cost to the federal government, to help serve as a catalyst for the FirstGov initiative. The existing search engine will remain in place until March 31, 2002. GSA is a centralized cen·tral·ize v. cen·tral·ized, cen·tral·iz·ing, cen·tral·iz·es v.tr. 1. To draw into or toward a center; consolidate. 2. federal procurement and property management agency created by Congress to improve government efficiency and help federal agencies better serve the public. It acquires, on behalf of federal agencies, office space, equipment, telecommunications, information technology, supplies and services. GSA, comprised of 14,000 associates, provides services and solutions for the office operations of over 1 million federal workers located in 8,300 government-owned and leased buildings. |
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