[Federal Register Volume 77, Number 110 (Thursday, June 7, 2012)]
[Notices]
[Pages 33739-33740]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2012-13826]


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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES


Announcement of Requirements and Registration for ``Health Data 
Platform Metadata Challenge''

AGENCY: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information 
Technology, HHS.

ACTION: Notice.

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    Award Approving Official: Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator 
for Health Information Technology.

SUMMARY: As part of the HHS Open Government Plan, the HealthData.gov 
Platform (HDP) is a flagship initiative and focal point helping to 
establish learning communities that collaboratively evolve and mature 
the utility and usability of a broad range of health and human service 
data. HDP will deliver greater potential for new data driven insights 
into complex interactions of health and health care services. To 
augment the HDP effort, seven complementary challenges will encourage 
innovation around initial platform- and domain-specific priority areas, 
fostering opportunities to tap the creativity of entrepreneurs and 
productivity of developers.
    The ``Health Data Platform Metadata Challenge'' requests the 
application of existing voluntary consensus standards for metadata 
common to all open government data, and invites new designs for health 
domain specific metadata to classify datasets in our growing catalog, 
creating entities, attributes and relations that form the foundations 
for better discovery, integration and liquidity.
    The statutory authority for this challenge competition is Section 
105 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (Pub. L. 111-
358).

DATES: Effective on June 5, 2012. Challenge submission period ends 
October 2, 2012, 11:59 p.m. et.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Adam Wong, 202-720-2866; Wil Yu, 202-
690-5920.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: 

Subject of Challenge Competition

    The W3C has a number of standard vocabulary recommendations for 
Linked Data publishers, defining cross domain semantic metadata of open 
government data, including concept schemes, provenance, statistics, 
organizations, people, data catalogs and their holdings, linked data 
assets, and geospatial data, in addition to the foundational standards 
of the Web of Data (such as HTTP, XML, RDF and various serializations, 
SPARQL, OWL, etc). Other voluntary consensus standards development 
organizations are also making valuable contributions to open standards 
for Linked Data publishers, such as the emerging GeoSPARQL standard 
from the Open Geospatial Consortium.
    In some cases, the entities and relations in these vocabulary 
standards are expressed using UML class diagrams as an abstract syntax, 
then automatically translated into various concrete syntaxes like XML 
Schemas and RDF Schemas, which also makes many of the standards from 
the Object Management Group easy to express as RDF Schemas, such as 
those that describe business motivation (including but not limited to 
vision, mission, strategies, tactics, goals, objectives), service 
orientation, process automation, systems integration, and other 
government specific standards. Oftentimes there exist domain specific 
standards organizations, with standards products that express domain 
specific entities and relations, such as those for the health or 
environmental sectors. The Data.gov PMO has recently stood up a site to 
collect these standards when expressed as RDF Schemas for use by the 
growing community of Government Linked Data publishers, which includes 
HHS/CMS, EPA, DOE/NREL, USDA, and the Library of Congress.
    The challenge winner will demonstrate the application of voluntary 
consensus and de facto cross domain and domain specific standards, 
using as many of the HHS datasets available on healthdata.gov as 
possible. There are two objectives:
    1. Apply existing standards as RDF Schemas from voluntary consensus 
standards organizations (W3C, OMG, OGC, etc.) for expressing cross 
domain metadata that is common to all open government data.
    2. Design new HHS domain specific metadata based on the data made 
available on healthdata.gov where no RDF Schema is otherwise given or 
available.
    When designing new metadata expressed as RDF Schemas, designers 
should:
     Leverage existing data dictionaries expressed as natural 
language in the creation of new conceptual schemas, as provided by 
domain authorities;
     Observe best practices for URI's schemes that is 
consistent with existing healthdata.gov work (such as the Clinical 
Quality Linked Data release from HDI 2011); and
     Organize related concepts into small, compose-able 
component vocabularies.
    Turtle syntax for RDFS and RDF is preferred. The contributed code 
will be given an open source license and managed by HHS on github.com, 
with copyright and attribution to the developer(s) as appropriate, and 
will ideally be used to populate vocab.data.gov.

Eligibility Rules for Participating in the Competition

    To be eligible to win a prize under this challenge, an individual 
or entity--
    (1) Shall have registered to participate in the competition under 
the rules promulgated by the Office of the

[[Page 33740]]

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
    (2) Shall have complied with all the requirements under this 
section.
    (3) In the case of a private entity, shall be incorporated in and 
maintain a primary place of business in the United States, and in the 
case of an individual, whether participating singly or in a group, 
shall be a citizen or permanent resident of the United States.
    (4) May not be a Federal entity or Federal employee acting within 
the scope of their employment.
    (5) Shall not be an HHS employee working on their applications or 
submissions during assigned duty hours.
    (6) Shall not be an employee of Office of the National Coordinator 
for Health IT.
    (7) Federal grantees may not use Federal funds to develop COMPETES 
Act challenge applications unless consistent with the purpose of their 
grant award.
    (8) Federal contractors may not use Federal funds from a contract 
to develop COMPETES Act challenge applications or to fund efforts in 
support of a COMPETES Act challenge submission.
    An individual or entity shall not be deemed ineligible because the 
individual or entity used Federal facilities or consulted with Federal 
employees during a competition if the facilities and employees are made 
available to all individuals and entities participating in the 
competition on an equitable basis.
    Entrants must agree to assume any and all risks and waive claims 
against the Federal Government and its related entities, except in the 
case of willful misconduct, for any injury, death, damage, or loss of 
property, revenue, or profits, whether direct, indirect, or 
consequential, arising from my participation in this prize contest, 
whether the injury, death, damage, or loss arises through negligence or 
otherwise.
    Entrants must also agree to indemnify the Federal Government 
against third party claims for damages arising from or related to 
competition activities.

Registration Process for Participants

    To register for this challenge participants should either:
     Access the www.challenge.gov Web site and search for the 
``Health Data Platform Metadata Challenge''.
     Access the ONC Investing in Innovation (i2) Challenge Web 
site at:
    [cir] http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/challenges/onc-i2-challenges/.
    [cir] A registration link for the challenge can be found on the 
landing page under the challenge description.

Amount of the Prize

    [ssquf] First Prize: $20,000.
    [ssquf] Second Prize: $10,000.
    [ssquf] Third Prize: $5,000.
    Awards may be subject to Federal income taxes and HHS will comply 
with IRS withholding and reporting requirements, where applicable.

Payment of the Prize

    Prize will be paid by contractor.

Basis Upon Which Winner Will Be Selected

    The ONC review panel will make selections based upon the following 
criteria:
     Metadata: The number of cross domain and domain specific 
voluntary consensus and defacto standard schemas, vocabularies or 
ontologies that are (re)used or designed and applied to HHS data on 
healthdata.gov.
     Data: The number of datasets that the standards based 
cross domain metadata and schema designed domain specific data is 
applied to.
     Linked Data: The solution should use best practices for 
the expression of metadata definitions and instance data 
identification, leveraging the relevant open standards, including but 
not limited to foundational standards (RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, OWL), and 
other defacto vocabularies and ontologies such as those listed here as 
required, with the expectation that existing standards will be reused 
to the fullest extent possible.
     Components: Leveraging software components that are 
already a part of the HDP is preferable, but other open source 
solutions may be used.
     Tools: Use of automation and round trip engineering that 
enable multiple concrete syntax realization from abstract syntax of 
cross domain and/or domain specific metadata is desirable, with no 
expectation that the tools must be open source or otherwise contributed 
to HDP as part of this challenge submission. Only newly designed domain 
specific RDF Schemas, their composition cross domain standards based 
RDF Schemas, and their application to various datasets are expected to 
be submitted for this challenge. Tool functionality may be highlighted 
to explain implementations as desired.
     Best practices: Where any new schemas and software code is 
created, they should exemplify design best practices and known software 
patterns, or otherwise establish them.
     Documentation: Articulation of design using well known 
architecture artifacts.
     Engagement: Willingness to participate in the community as 
a maintainer/committer after award.

Additional Information

    The virtual machines and codebase outputs from innovations 
demonstrated by challenge participants will be made publically 
available through HHS Github repositories (see https://github.com/hhs/) 
as release candidates for further community refinement as necessary, 
including open source licensing and contributor attribution as 
appropriate.

    Authority: 15 U.S.C. 3719.

    Dated: May 31, 2012.
Farzad Mostashari,
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
[FR Doc. 2012-13826 Filed 6-6-12; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4150-45-P