Development and Maintenance of Master Databases

Item Description:

The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) was established under Regulation (EC) No 1406/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council for the purpose of ensuring a high, uniform and effective level of maritime safety, as amended. Among its tasks, one of the Agency’s main objectives is to provide technical and scientific assistance to the European Commission and Member States in the proper development and implementation of EU legislation on maritime safety, pollution by ships and security on board of ships. To accomplish this, one of EMSA’s most important supporting tasks is to improve cooperation with, and between, Member States through the development of EU maritime information systems.

Through the last 15 years, EMSA has developed five maritime information systems, namely: SafeSeaNet (SSN) for vessels traffic monitoring, the Earth Observation Data Centre (EDOC), the EU Long Range Identification and Tracking of ships Data Centre (EU LRIT DC), STAR for ship positions collection and distribution and ship activity tracking, and THETIS for vessels and port facilities inspections. EMSA has developed as well horizontal services such as an identity and access management system.

All five systems and horizontal services rely for their operation on reference and master data such as ships identification information and particulars, location codes, country codes, public organisation details and codes lists. Such information is generally duplicated in each information systems and for some of the information, EMSA has developed “central databases”. In the present situation, inconsistencies of the master data between the information systems occur for different reasons which include e.g. duplication of the data with distinct maintenance approaches, issues with connections with existing central databases, difficulties with maintenance and development of central databases.

In order to address the issue, EMSA intends to develop new Master Databases for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing its master data throughout the organization and EMSA’s stakeholders such as the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) Member States to ensure a common understanding, consistency, accuracy and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this master data.

The Master Databases will integrate with EMSA’s information systems and with external systems such as the EU and EEA Member States’ maritime applications.

Objective, scope and description of the contract

The objective of this procurement procedure is to establish a Framework Service Contract (FWC) for IT services related to the development, corrective maintenance and evolutive maintenance of Master Databases. The Framework Service Contract shall be concluded for a maximum duration of four years.

The FWC comprises four modules:

• Module 1 – Development of the Central Ship Database version 2.0 (CSD v2.0). The Specific Contract is to be signed immediately after the signature of the FWC. The Specific Contract for Module 1 shall have a maximum duration of nine months. The requirements for provision of services for the Specific Contract under this module are in Appendix TS.02.
• Module 2 – Master databases development and potential enhancements of the Master Databases developed in the course of the Framework Contract. Tasks shall be requested by EMSA to the contractor based on specific contracts.
• Module 3 – IT Helpdesk and corrective maintenance services for Master Databases developed within this Framework Contract under Modules 1 and 2 including application incident management, bug fixing and minor scale changes regarding operational requirements evolution. Module 3 services shall be requested by EMSA to the contractor based on specific contracts with the duration of 6 months, throughout the duration of the Framework Contract. The requirements for provision of services for the specific contracts under this module are in the Appendix TS.05.
• Module 4 – Data management services for Master Databases developed within this Framework Contract under Modules 1 and 2 including assessment of conflicts between data sources, assessment of data quality and correction of data records individually or in batch. Tasks shall be requested by EMSA to the contractor based on specific contracts.

The services defined above will be implemented via requests for services after the FWC (IT) is signed and in force, through specific contracts. The baseline for all specific contracts related to Modules 1, 2 and 3 is to use Fixed Deliverable & Timing types of contracts, defined in Annex I of the FWC (IT). The baseline for all specific contracts related to Module 4 is to use Time & Means (TM) types of contracts, defined in Annex II of the FWC (IT),

In order to have a full picture of the technologies adopted in EMSA, the tenderer shall also take into account the EMSA System and Application Technical Landscape (provided in the Appendix A to the General Terms and Conditions for IT Contracts.). This document indicates which middleware and software technologies may be used for an application implementation. The use and adoption of any other technologies need the express permission of EMSA.

The Master Databases from Modules 1 and 2 will be developed on top of the Master Data Management solution TIBCO EBX, a proprietary software component of the company Tibco-Orchestra.

The maintenance of TIBCO EBX is out of scope of this Call for Tender (EMSA will buy its own licenses and contract the maintenance of TIBCO EBX). However, the maintenance of the interfaces with TIBCO EBX and the configuration of TIBCO EBX are part of the FWC activities. This includes the development of data models and data flows.

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