CTA or PEI:             Information and Communications

Project Description:

New and emergent "Internet technologies" such as XML, Java, servlets,
and the like, are rapidly gaining "commodity" status, with the
userbase, tools, and infrastructure that implies.  Besides their
common uses on the Internet, such tools offer the prospect of a new
way of constructing specialized web-based information environments
(intranets).  At present, intranets are most often constructed using
proprietary tools such as Lotus Notes.  While quite effective for the
purpose, proprietary tools tend to lag far behind, or ignore
completely new commodity tools. New trends include support for a variety
of clients including hand held devices and new high level tools to
simplify task of building new capabilities. For instance, Hewlett-Packard's
new E-Spreak technology aims to cut the time of building a new e-commerce
site by a factor of 100. Intranets built using systems like E-Speak (which
is fully open source) would be designed to support the tools needed by IMT or T and E
(e.g. visualization and data analysis) not e-commerce and allow rapid
information technology support of new DoD projects. PET partners can
produce these prototypes which will show the way to new ways of operation
for DoD. For instance, our Gateway activity was correctly based on leading edge technologies
when it was first designed 18 months ago and is prototyping new convenient
computing portals. In the same way, IOE will protype new information portals
which can take advantage of the best emerging technologies. Here in fact there
is competition for E-Speak (such as Ninja from UCB) which could be even better; PET
will design IOE to be able to able to experiment with and evaluate these new ideas
which include support for cost effective redundant workstation(PC) cluster as
base hardware.

While intranets are most often thought of in a business sense, they
have broad application, including scientific research.  Essentially,
they can be thought of as specialized environments for manipulating
various kinds of information.  Underlying most intranets is the
concept of one or more databases, and the intranet essentially
provides specialized web-based interfaces to them.  In the context of
the HPC Modernization Program, an intranet could easily encompass not
only typical "business" tools, but also provide an online repository
of technical documents, calendars of scientific meetings, discussions
forums, repositories of hardware and software information, and access
to specialized database resources.  Essentially the same technologies
are involved in developing web-based access to data-intensive problems
such as the analysis T&E test data.

The technologies required to build these environments are new, and in
some cases still immature both in robustness and understanding of 
needed features.  In order to understand how to use and
integrate them most effectively, and where they may need extension, it
is necessary to begin using them as quickly as possible to build
prototype intranet services, enabling us to analyze and evaluate the
latest tools and designs.

The most important products of this project will be not the tools
themselves (though we expect them to be useful as well), but the
understanding and experience of how they can be used to construct
sophisticated environments.  This understanding can later be
transferred to other PET, MSRC, and HPCMP projects that can benefit
from web-based information environments, such as the T&E community.

Project Objectives:

This is a joint ARL/NCSA/NPAC effort evaluate and gain experience
with commodity tools for building intranets.

Deliverables:

o NCSA will define security architecture, user interface and offer to
  host system.
o NPAC will supply servlet XML based architecture and analysis of forward
  looking architecture
o NCSA will provide technical analysis of calendaring systems which
  ARL will evaluate.
o NPAC NCSA and ARL will provide database schema and XML tags.
o NPAC and NCSA, in discussion with ARL, will design and implement
  various business and technical information tools to be deployed to
  ARL MSRC staff and users as demonstrations of the technologies, and
  to aid evaluation of them.

Customers/End Users:

HPCMP, ARL MSRC, PET Program management and staff, Users

Benefit to Warfighter:

In the longer term, as technical intranets are deployed to groups like
TECOM there will be great efficiency and productivity benefits. As we
develop our understanding of these technologies and prototype tools
using them, the benefits will be more local -- to the MSRC and a
subset of Users.

Project Dependencies and Scope:

This is a joint project involving ARL MSRC, NCSA and NPAC

Risk Element:

Though we will try to deploy the prototype intranet tools for use
within the MSRC and PET, there is a risk that even a technically sound
system may be a practical failure if the user community does not
accept it.  First, we must recognize that the primary goal of this
project is not the tools themselves, but the understanding of how to
build them.  Nevertheless, user uptake is helpful in evaluating the
technologies, and we must recognize that we face the same risk, but
multiplied, in deployment of future domain-targeted systems based on
this work.  Therefore, it is in our interest to pay attention to this
risk from the start. To manage this risk, one must first recognize
that sociological factors as well as technical ones play a role in the
overall success of the project.  Then it is important that at every
step, the functionality and design be carefully considered with an eye
to the sociological factors.

Required Funding Level
        Year X: Year 3 ~$42k (to be refined)
        Year X+1: Year 4 ~$175k (to be refined)
        Year X+2: Year 5 TBD