[Federal Register Volume 77, Number 110 (Thursday, June 7, 2012)]
[Notices]
[Pages 33740-33742]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2012-13830]


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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES


Announcement of Requirements and Registration for ``Health Data 
Platform Simple Sign-On 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 Simple Sign-On Challenge'' will improve 
community engagement by providing simplified sign on (SSO) for external 
users interacting across multiple HDP technology components, making it 
easier for community collaborators to contribute, leveraging new 
approaches to decentralized authentication.

[[Page 33741]]

    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

    Healthdata.gov is leveraging a variety of open source 
infrastructure components including the Drupal 7 content management 
system, the CKAN data portal, the Solr search engine, and the community 
edition of the Virtuoso (as a RDF database and SPARQL endpoint query 
service). Going forward, the HDP team intends to realize an 
architecture similar to the Linked Data Integration Framework (LDIF) 
and leverage tools in the LOD2 stack where possible, beginning with 
Ontowiki to be used as Virtuoso editor, most likely followed by SILK 
for cross domain correlation. HDP would like to enable service 
requestors to be authenticated using WebID from the W3C. Some of the 
current and upcoming HDP infrastructure components support aspects of 
WebID functionality already while others do not. A number of WebID 
libraries are available, written in various languages.
    This challenge winner will present a replicable open source virtual 
machine environment demonstrating how HDP components (with an initial 
emphasis on Virtuoso,\1\ Drupal 7,\2\ CKAN,\3\ OntoWiki,\4\ and 
Solr,\5\) can provide and/or consume WebID's, contributing to 
simplified sign-on for humans and machines. The developer designs how 
their code might utilize each component as a WebID identity provider or 
relying party, presumably leveraging existing capabilities to the 
fullest extent possible. The end result will demonstrate seamless 
integration across a number of HDP components, without introducing any 
external service dependencies that couldn't be operated by HHS. 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.
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    \1\ http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/.
    \2\ http://www.acquia.com/Drupal-7.
    \3\ http://ckan.org/.
    \4\ http://lod2.eu/Project/OntoWiki.html.
    \5\ http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.
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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 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 Simple Sign-On 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

     First Prize: $20,000.
     Second Prize: $10,000.
     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:
     Coverage: The more integrated components the better, with 
an emphasis on leverage existing work and capabilities of each 
component.
     Coupling: The level with which any integrated components 
can be removed without affecting the remaining component functionality.
     Performance: The lowest latency and best responsiveness of 
the component interactions as demonstrated by test cases.
     Elegance: How the design deals with both human and 
application agents that interact with different interfaces, and how 
each is managed across infrastructure components.
     Documentation: Articulation of design using well known 
architecture artifacts and executable test cases.
     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.


[[Page 33742]]


    Dated: May 31, 2012.
Farzad Mostashari,
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
[FR Doc. 2012-13830 Filed 6-6-12; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4150-45-P