3. 2. Information Infrastructure Services

Services provide the underlying network-capable building blocks upon which the National Challenges can be constructed. They will form the basis of the ubiquitous "Information Web" of the 21st century. Services bridge the gap between the communications bitways and the application-specific software components that implement the National Challenges.

• Universal Network Services: Extensions to the existing Internet technology base will provide more widespread use by a much larger number of users. These include techniques for improved ease-of-use, "plug and play" network interoperation, remote maintenance, exploitation of new "last mile" technologies like cable TV and wireless, management of hybrid/asymmetric network bandwidth, guaranteed quality of service for continuous media streams, and scale-up of network capabilities to dramatically larger numbers of users.

• Integration and Translation Services: These services support the migration of existing data files, databases, libraries, and programs to new, better integrated models of computing, such as object-oriented systems. They also provide mechanisms to support continued access to older "legacy" forms of data as the models evolve. Included are services for data format translation and interchange as well as tools to translate the access portions of existing programs. Techniques include "wrappers" which surround existing elements with new interfaces, integration frameworks which define application-specific common interfaces and data formats, and "mediators" which extend generic translation capabilities with domain knowledge-based computations, permitting abstraction and fusion of data.

• System Software Services: These include operating system services to support complex, distributed, time-sensitive, and bandwidth-sensitive applications such as the National Challenges. The services support the distribution of processing across processing nodes within the network, the partitioning of the application logic among heterogeneous nodes based on their specialized capabilities or considerations of asymmetric or limited interconnection bandwidth, guaranteed real-time response to applications for continuous media streams, and storage, retrieval and I/O capabilities suitable for delivering large volumes of data to very large numbers of users. Techniques include persistent storage, programming language support, and file systems.

• Data and Knowledge Management Services: These services include extensions to existing database management technology for combining knowledge and expertise with data. These include methods for tracking the ways in which information has been transformed. Techniques include distributed databases, mechanisms for search, discovery, dissemination, and interchange, aggregating base data and programmed methods into "objects," and support for persistent object stores incorporating data, rules, multimedia, and computation.

• Information Security Services: These services provide support for the protection of the security of information, enhanced privacy and confidentiality for users of the infrastructure, the protection of intellectual property rights, and the authentication of information sources within the infrastructure. Techniques include privacy-enhanced mail, methods of encryption and key-escrow, and digital signatures. Also included are techniques for protecting the infrastructure, such as authorization mechanisms and firewalls against intrusion attacks such as worms, viruses, and trojan horses.

• Reliable Computing and Communications Services: These include system software services for non-stop, highly reliable computer and communications systems that can operate for 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. The techniques include mechanisms for fast system restart such as process shadowing, reliable distributed transaction commit protocols, and event and data redo logging to keep data consistent and up-to-date in the face of system failures.

Next Section