As defined in the FY 1997 Blue Book:
"LSN R&D will assure U.S. technological leadership in
communications through R&D that advances the leading edge of
networking technologies and services. This includes advanced network
components and technologies for engineering and management of
large-scale networks, both for scientific and engineering R&D and
for other purposes. Areas of particular focus include (1) technologies
and services that enable wireless, optical, mobile, and wireline
communications; (2) networking software that enables information to be
disseminated to individuals, multicast to select groups, or broadcast to
an entire network; (3) software for efficient development and execution
of scalable distributed applications; (4) software components for
distributed applications, such as electronic commerce, digital
libraries, and health care; and (5) software for infrastructure support
and testbeds."
Existing network transport protocols are very successful in enabling data transport across heterogeneous systems. In addition to this basic level of service, interoperability requires higher level functions that include partitioning, placement, migration of applications into distributed components of communications, computation, and storage, and the allocation of system resources to their execution. As servers and their caches of information move through the network to different host systems and adapt under different service loads, applications must be able to discover their location. Applications will need to locate and access global libraries of multimedia objects. As the various national information infrastructures aggregate into a true Global Information Infrastructure, more reliable mechanisms for cooperative authentication, resource allocation, and charging are needed.
Components for high-level object services must be designed to be highly adaptive and composable. Reliable mechanisms are needed, especially in a complex inter-networked environment, to locate and register object services and to certify object and service functionality. More capable scripting and agent services are needed to describe and execute arbitrary tasks. Competent high-level support services are needed to create, publish, record, disseminate, and protect digital objects, such as multimedia documents. To insure that objects interoperate, new technologies such as mediators and wrappers are needed, as well as frameworks that support interoperability through common object protocols, interfaces, and adapters. This research includes the development and implementation of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technologies.
In order to rapidly and accurately analyze varied information, technologies must be developed to enable the rapid correlation of collections of multimedia objects physically distributed across different repositories, which may be geographically dispersed. This requires the development of the next generation of object (data and computation) retrieval, filtering, indexing, and digital library technologies. These technologies will enable personal adaptive information spaces critical for:
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scientific analysis environments
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remote instruments
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remote computational models of physical phenomena
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complex system and product design and analysis environments
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business trend analysis and filtering |
Information brokering refers to the storage of information, whereas analysis deals with the retrieval of information. Technology for information brokering must be developed to make it significantly easier to author new kinds of information objects and to charge for the access and use of such objects. This includes tools for group authoring, annotation of objects, and collaboration on evolving objects. An important form of brokering service will be recording and sharing annotated navigation paths through the network, in order to provide value-added summaries of the materials available.
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