By Peter A. Buxbaum found at military-information-technology.com
The essential assumption behind the concept of network-centric
warfare is that superior and more timely information will help warfighters
more successfully find, track and hit enemy targets. For that to work,
access to information stored across thousands of defense domains is
essential.
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is in the process of
developing a portfolio of capabilities, under the heading of Network
Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), that will aid in the cross-functional
posting and utilization of data. DISA’s content discovery and delivery
capability, a contract for which is expected to be awarded this year, is
designed to enable warfighters to search and discover data relevant to
their work across the defense enterprise.
The acquisition will be structured similar to the NCES collaboration
services contract, the first part of which was awarded last year. In that
model, the functionality is outsourced to one or more vendors, and the
Department of Defense pays for the services on a usage basis. (See MIT,
Volume 10, Issue 8, page 26.)
What DISA is after, in a nutshell, is to make available a tool on the
Global Information Grid (GIG) that will be able to perform information
searches like those available at the popular Google search site. It should
come as no surprise, therefore, that the Google company itself is likely
to play a major role in any such future endeavor.
Google will not be competing for a prime contract for the content
discovery and delivery capability, however, but will be supplying its
enterprise search appliance to more than one bidder for the prime
contract. Each bidder partnering with Google will separately architect its
proposed capability and add additional bells and whistles to it, according
to its own vision of the DISA requirement.
Industry Best Practices
DISA has been conducting research to determine the most logical way
ahead for the integration of NCES content discovery and delivery services
over the past couple of years, according to Teresa Cardin, a DISA IT
specialist.
“The goals were to utilize commercial industry best practices,”
Cardin said. “After careful review and analysis, it was determined that
the commercial product that would best match the NCES capabilities
baseline requirements and provide the most cost benefit to the warfighter
was the search appliance provided by Google.”
DISA decided that an operational evaluation would best provide the
assurance that service offerings would match the requirements being sought
with respect to content discovery and delivery.
“What this capability will allow defense users to do is to log onto a
classified network and, through a portal, to conduct searches for
information,” said Ken Bartee, chief executive officer of McDonald
Bradley, which was the lead contractor on DoD’s horizontal fusion pilot,
a key precursor to NCES.
“If you are a logistician worried about shipments of water into
theater, there may be seven different systems that include that
information,” Bartee explained. “With the content discovery and
delivery capability, a logistician will be able to access those seven
different information systems. In the past, he would have had to log into
each of the seven databases separately. This way, he’ll be able to
search the seven simultaneously and get the data he is looking for,
without a lot of noise that he’s not interested in.”
In 2006, DISA began the initial Google operational evaluation at the
Defense Enterprise Computing Center-Europe facility in Stuttgart, Germany,
on NIPRNet. The operational evaluation included a number of key elements:
verification of Google abilities to make searchable defined information
products; ease of use; ensuring integration with existing DoD portal
technologies; failover and load-balancing capabilities; the ability to
restrict access to ensure compliance with existing DoD policies; and
compliance with DoD security requirements.
DISA similarly researched and reviewed available commercial products to
be used as part of the NCES content delivery capability. “DISA decided
that the most appropriate way ahead was to move along the same path
defined by the Air Force content delivery initiative,” said Cardin.
“The decision was made to begin a pilot of Akamai capabilities to
determine if the Akamai product would match the NCES capabilities baseline
requirements. During the first quarter of FY 2006, U.S Central Command
agreed to become the first pilot participant.” The evaluation is still
ongoing.
“We got engaged early on and quickly with this project,” reported
Phil Dixon, DoD manager at Google’s enterprise unit. DISA’s reasoning
in selecting Google for the pilot project involved two elements, he
suggested.
“DISA wanted to get a market leader in quickly,” Dixon said, “and
just as important, they wanted to give warfighters capabilities that they
already know and trust to work very well, and feel comfortable with.”
Beyond that, DISA was also seeking to provide a service with a mature
capability that would reduce the total cost of legacy content staging and
delivery, according to Dixon. Google, in addition to providing the
ubiquitous Internet search engine, also offers search tools to business
enterprises inside their corporate firewalls.
“Google’s motto and marching order is to make all information
universally accessible,” Dixon explained. “This includes information
behind the firewall and not just on the Web, but on the desktop and in all
information realms.”
Behind the Firewall
What Google has done is to take its popular Internet search technology
and adapt it to create an appliance to provide search services behind the
corporate firewall. “It has the same look and feel as the Internet
appliance,” Dixon related, “with a simplistic look, results organized
by relevancy and language translation capabilities. All of this is
available in the technology that Google brings to the enterprise.”
But there are also important differences between the kinds of
capabilities DISA is seeking and those delivered by Google, according to
Art Fritzson, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. “Content
discovery and delivery is dealing with secure information,” he said.
“When you do a Google search on the Internet, you get back everything
Google can find. On the Global Information Grid, you’re supposed to get
back only what you’re allowed to see. It is a complex problem to deliver
information based on the attributes of who’s doing the asking.”
While content discovery and delivery may at first seem like just a
high-powered search engine, it’s more challenging than that for other
reasons as well, Fritzson observed. “Content discovery and delivery is
supposed to allow the sharing information among computers and computer
systems, and not just with end users.”
Dixon said he expects Google to play a major role in whatever contract
is awarded later this year to a content discovery and delivery integrator.
“Although we don’t intend to bid on this as a prime contractor,” he
said, “we expect to work with those that are.”
Google is currently providing its enterprise search capability to DISA.
“We intend to be a technology provider, and work with entity experts in
integration to bring the extended capabilities to defense
organizations,” he said.
As for how these multiple Google partners will differentiate themselves
to DISA, Dixon said, “In general, it can best be described as
architectural differences, as well as differences in other technologies
they will want to integrate with Google.”
Integrators competing for the content discovery and delivery contract
can be expected to tout value-added capabilities not available directly
through the Google appliance. “We want to integrate best breed
functionalities and integrate them with Google as a foundational
technology,” said Vivian Pecus, senior vice president for integrated
defense systems at FGM. FGM has partnered with Solers in a joint venture
called Mirius for the purposes of bidding on the DISA contract and to
develop similar products for the commercial marketplace.
“One thing you don’t get with Google out of the box is the ability
to automatically index certain kinds of files important to DoD users,”
said Paul Bailor, program director at Mirius. “The Google search
appliance will be one product packaged inside ours.”
Metadata Standard
The capabilities Mirius will add to the Google enterprise appliance
include complete compatibility with the Defense Discovery Metadata
Specification (DDMS), an FGM specialty. Solers will contribute federated
search and enterprise catalog utilities. DDMS is a DoD-wide specification
used to tag electronic content in order to facilitate information
searches.
Mirius has also used the capabilities of its parent companies to
provide data content discovery tools developed specifically to integrate
with command and control systems, according to Pecus. The joint venture
will also be leveraging automated publishing tools, which will allow an
operator to manually publish information, and also allow Web services to
create automated machine-to-machine publishing and searching.
Mirius will also be incorporating a commercial product from Inxight,
which allows searching multiple sources simultaneously while bringing back
results incrementally and aggregating them. In other words, if the search
appliance is scouring 100 databases, this utility will start feeding
relevant results back to the user even before the search has been
completed.
“Each search may take a different amount of time until it returns an
answer,” Bailor explained.
Bailor added that Mirius intends to leverage the available lessons
learned from the DISA pilots to package and integrate similar products
that can be inserted into existing commercial enterprise IT
infrastructures. “We expect to have that ready for the marketplace
within the next three to six months,” he said. “Commercial content
management has been hot for the last three to five years. But companies
are discovering that existing technologies are not living up to their
promises. They are still spending a lot of time searching for the right
information. What they need is more precise indexing of information and
integration of applications through a service-oriented architecture.”
McDonald Bradley will also bring its additional capabilities to
DISA’s NCES table, according to Bartee. One such automated capability
provides support to the intelligence analysis function.
“A key addition to the utility Google can provide to DoD is the
ability to provide the semantic markup of a data source,” Bartee said.
“If a user needs to search 40 intelligence sources for information on
the intent of an enemy, we are able to gets results within a narrow band
of what the user is looking for through a semantic markup of the XML
metadata. That’s something Google can’t do.”
Semantic markup refers to a technique of encoding meaning and context
into XML data metatags.
“Let’s say a user wants to find intelligence on what North Korea
will do next,” Bartee continued. “He may have to search 100 databases
and our tool, by doing a link analysis among the results, can aid in the
development of a finished intelligence product.”
Portal Technology
DISA has thus far remained silent on the precise approach it will take
to provide content discovery and delivery capabilities. Clearly, any such
tools will have to be integrated into existing defense portal
technologies.
One of the key lessons learned from the pilot was to “determine the
importance of providing a capability that could be integrated with
existing portal technologies already in use by the warfighter, such as
Defense Knowledge Online, Army Knowledge Online and Share Point,”
according to DISA’s Cardin.
“The plans for deploying the NCES content discovery and delivery
services include integrating these capabilities as part of offerings found
within the Defense Knowledge Online and Defense Knowledge Online-SIPRNet
portals,” Cardin added. “This enterprise approach will include
maximizing the use of existing NCES services that offer the ability to
authenticate user access to these services.”
Fritzson said he expects DISA to articulate specifications for content
discovery and delivery unambiguously based on open standards, so that
there will be opportunities for many players to participate. “That way,
all components will be able to talk to all others over the NCES
service,” he explained.
But there are a number of different ways to package such a capability,
Fritzson added. “It’s hard to predict what strategy DISA will pursue
in order to accomplish that mission. They could simply publish
specifications or they could be out to buy turnkey systems. They could
also issue multiple awards, so that a number of different players could
provide services defined by the specs. It depends on how they choose to
roll it out.”
According to Bailor, the capabilities tested in the DISA pilot will
have to be made more robust before they are ready for DoD-wide use.
The ultimate desired performance level of any proposed system will
depend on the service level agreement that DISA specifies in its request
for proposal, as well as several other parameters, including the number of
concurrent users to be accommodated, the number of documents to be stored,
the number of data sources to be searched, and the required level of
fidelity of the search responses.
Contact E-mail addresses:
Phil Dixon: phild@google.com
Art Fritzson: fritzson_art@bah.com
Paul Bailor: Paul.Bailor@mirius.net
