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System & Technology Demonstration Projects
Earlier Projects and Other Areas of Interest
ADL Registry (ADL-R)
The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, managed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness (DUSD/R), sponsored an effort to specify the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA) which brought together existing standards and specifications in content management and network computing with the goal of greatly enhancing the reuse and interoperability of distributed learning content compatible with the sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). One of the components was CNRI's Handle System technology, for use generating and resolving identifiers, developed as part of CNRI's DARPA-funded Digital Object Architecture research. Specifically, CNRI designed, built, and deployed a registration system for the ADL project, known as the ADL Registry, or ADL-R, which enabled the discovery and reuse of learning content held in repositories distributed across the DoD. A generic version of ADL-R is available at Digital Object Registry. Future versions will have added configuration options and will be useable in any community of practice. Future versions will also introduce the ability to federate individual registries across communities of practice and will advance the CORDRA effort.
Application Gateway System
The Application Gateway System (AGS), a distributed server system consisting of multiple heterogeneous servers that appears as a single high performance system on the Internet.
Computer Science Technical Reports Project
The Computer Science Technical Reports (CS-TR) project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, developed network access to archives of technical information in the domain of computer science, with the goal of evolving knowledge in the field of information storage, search, and retrieval. The Digital Object Architecture project continues the architecture work of the CS-TR project.
Cross Industry Working Team
CNRI supported and participated in the Cross Industry Working Team (XIWT), a multi-industry coalition that was committed to defining the architecture and key technical requirements for a powerful, sustainable national information infrastructure (NII). (See Managing Access to Digital Information, May 1997, and other XIWT White Papers.
Defense Virtual Information Architecture (DVIA)
The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and CNRI developed the Defense Virtual Information Architecture (DVIA) by leveraging CNRI's Digital Object Architecture and Handle System, in combination with existing open standards, to provide an extensible, secure, and federated digital information management system capable of disseminating metadata and data in a secure and context sensitive manner. The DVIA-RS prototype demonstrated a "Navigational Search and Discovery" user interface built upon a Secure Contextual Linking Service (SCLS) which dynamically computed context sensitive, authenticated, and authorized search and access over technical reports, their respective metadata, associated multimedia, and archival material retrieval. All requests to the DVIA-RS registry were expressed as OpenURLs and were exclusively processed by the SCLS. The SCLS dynamically resolved all entity handle IDs into their respective descriptions, references, authentication, and service end points, and used them all to process the request. The SCLS was, in effect, a dynamic and extensible service-to-resource linker that was at the base of the DVIA-RS's extensibility. The SCLS used the Handle System as a PKI, an authorization platform, and as a secure policy identification, registration and distribution system, enabling the DVIA-RS to establish secure, trusted connections to services, and authenticate and authorize queries to restrict who could access which services and/or resources. DVIA was developed with support from the DARPA under contract HR0011-05-1-0003.
Distributed Integration Testbed
The Distributed Integration Testbed Project was a three year effort that included the D-Lib Test Suite, metrics and quantitative measures for digital libraries research, interoperability research, and experiments in electronic publishing including D-Lib Magazine.
DO Repository
The Digital Object (DO) Repository enabled the management of digital objects on the Internet. It had an open, flexible, secure and scalable protocol and software suite that provided a common interface for interacting directly with all types of digital objects through an interface based on the use of unique and persistent identifiers. The DO Repository was integrated into Cordra.
DO Registry
The Digital Object (DO) Registry functioned as a specialized index over a collection of digital material held in one or more repositories. Registry users provided metadata schemas, and objects were registered with their metadata. That metadata was indexed and made searchable. Objects could be stored and managed by the DO Registry, and those objects would be assigned, or assumed to already have, a persistent identifier in the form of a handle. The DO Registry was integrated into Cordra.
Electronic Payments Forum
The EPF was initiated in November, 1995, to provide a mechanism for information exchange and to identify and examine issues regarding financial payment systems on the Internet. The EPF was organized under the auspices of CommerceNet, the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) and the Cross-Industry Working Team (XIWT), dedicated to the advancement of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII).
Gigabit Testbed Initiative
The Gigabit Testbed Initiative was a major effort by approximately forty organizations representing universities, telecommunication carriers, industry and national laboratories, and computer companies to create a set of very high-speed network testbeds and to explore their application to areas such as weather modeling, chemical dynamics, radiation oncology, and geophysics data exploration. This effort was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and by industry. See the Testbed Initiative Final Report (PDF Version: hdl:42634537/5036; HTML Version: hdl:4263537/5035).
Grail® Internet Browser
Grail® was an extensible Internet browser written in the interpreted object-oriented programming language Python. It ran on Unix, and, to some extent, on Windows and Macintosh. Grail was distributed in source form, free of charge, and without warranties. It required Python and Tcl/Tk to run. It supported the protocols and file formats commonly found on the Web, such as HTTP, FTP, and HTML, but it was designed to be easily extended to support other protocols or file formats, such as those used in CNRI's Handle System. Grail development was moved to SourceForge.
IOPS.ORG
IOPS.ORG promoted cooperation and information-sharing across and among Internet service providers in the public interest, including joint problem resolution, technology assessment, and global Internet scaling and integrity. It supported engineering analysis, system simulation and testing, and interaction with other groups and organizations.
MAGIC
MAGIC-II, a collaborative project involving seven major participants, developed a large-scale distributed information system based on a very general paradigm in which high-performance computing, storage, and communications were used to provide rapid access to real-time data sources and to large volumes of stored data, the existence and locations of which may not be known in advance. Applications that used this paradigm arose in a variety of situations including military operations, intelligence imagery analysis, and natural disasters.
National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress
CNRI worked with the Library of Congress to design and implement an open distributed system allowing networked access to digitized material from the Library of Congress' collections, as part of the National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress. Details of the prototype work appear in "An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries" in the February 1997 issue of D-Lib Magazine.
Python® and JPython®
Python is a state-of-the-art portable, interpreted, object-oriented programming language that runs on most platforms.
JPython is an implementation of Python that is seamlessly integrated with the Java platform, providing a powerful companion to Java where use of a higher level language is appropriate.
Speech and Language Processing Center
The Speech and Language Processing Center fostered research and development for technology in both spoken and written human language. Spoken language projects aimed to enable humans to interact with computers using natural conversation, while text-based projects address issues of evaluation, component integration and handling multiple data sources.
Spoken Dialogue Systems
Spoken dialogue systems enable users to interact with computer systems via natural and intelligent dialogues, as they would with human agents. Development of such systems requires a wide range of speech and language technologies. These include automatic speech recognition to convert audio signals of human speech into text strings, language understanding to interpret the meaning of the recognized utterances, and dialogue processing and response planning to generate cooperative and useful system replies. Text-to-speech synthesis is used to convert the system utterance into actual speech output.
CNRI participated in research in creating speech interfaces that can interact in natural and fluid conversations with people. The projects were concerned with building systems that made it easier for people to navigate information using natural speech. The goal was to develop methodologies that would enable machines to understand the context and nuances that people employ in conversation to conduct day-to-day tasks.
Stackworks
Stackworks is an activity which focuses on the organization and management of archival collections of information.
Transient Network Architecture (TNA)
Researchers from CNRI and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of New Mexico collaborated on Transient Network Architecture, based on the notion of a pervasive transient mobile network in which all communications occur between persistently identified entities. Such a network, which is mobile and ubiquitous in nature, allows entities to form and associate themselves with coordinated ad-hoc networks. These networks are provided the means to integrate almost seamlessly with each other. All entities that are part of this network are identified with handles and traffic routing and communication are also performed based on these identifiers. This translates into effectively replacing IP addresses with handles at the network level and opens the door to truly abstract persistent communications.
US Copyright Office CORDS
CNRI helped to develop CORDS (Copyright Office Registration, Recordation, & Deposit System), a limited production system of the US Copyright Office that provided electronic registration and deposit of digital objects for copyright.
See also CNRI's current System & Technology Demonstration Projects.