NGI Implementation Plan Section 4: Revolutionary Applications

	4.  Revolutionary Applications 4.1  Introduction 4.2  Application Selection and Coordination 4.2.1  NGI Applications Selection Process 4.2.1.1  NGI Funded Agency Missions 4.2.1.2  NGI Affinity Groups 4.2.1.3  CCIC Applications Council 4.2.1.4  Broader Communities 4.2.2  Funding 4.2.3  Prioritization Schemata 4.2.4  NGI Criteria 4.2.5  Applications Support Function
4.  Goal 3	Goal 3: Revolutionary Applications
4.1 Introduction	Introduction   Applications are the ultimate success metric of this program. Faster and more advanced networks will enable a new generation of applications that include crisis response, distance education, environmental monitoring, health care, scientific research, and national security.   To achieve this goal, agencies will leverage the NGI investments significantly with other major application investments. Agencies will demonstrate new applications, as well as enhance and enable current mission applications that meet important national goals and missions. Each demonstration will partner the advanced networking technologies developed in Goals 1 and 2 with modern applications technologies. Each community will bring its knowledge, skills, and methods to the partnership. The applications partner will provide the bulk of the resources and support needed to implement its applications. The partner will work within the framework of the NGI initiative to develop and demonstrate its applications over the high performance networking infrastructure by using advanced network technologies provided by other parts of the NGI. The applications demonstrations will primarily be proof-of-concept demonstrations. Many of these demonstrations will suggest new ways for the application partners to meet their mission needs. The demonstrations are part of a research effort, as such, they will initially be built on less-than-fully-robust technologies and be operating in less-than-bulletproof networking environments.   Many agencies have critical signature applications that will benefit from advanced networking services and capabilities. Both the Federal government's information technology services and the Federally supported R&D community have networking requirements that cannot be met with today's networking technology. Higher speed networks with more advanced services and functionality will enable a new generation of applications that support fundamental governmental interests including disaster response; distance education; environmental monitoring, prediction, and warnings; national security; scientific research; and health care.   As the NGI initiative develops capabilities such as QoS, nomadicity, and adaptive networking for the NGI, advanced demonstration applications will take advantage of these new services. It is expected that additional agencies will participate in these applications. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have identified key applications requiring NGI speed and services. The education community is putting significant effort into connecting K-12 schools to the current generation Internet. Advanced education applications such as distance learning are expected to be major partners as the NGI matures. NGI applications prototypes will test these new capabilities to ensure that the protocols developed in Goals 1 and 2 are complete, robust, and useful in real applications and to provide a road map to future governmental and commercial services.   Success in reaching Goal 3 depends on success in Goals 1 and 2. Hence, Goal 3 drives the selection of the capabilities and designs for the other goals. In addition it requires integrating the new networking capabilities with the application domain.   Although this program will not provide substantial direct funding for applications, it will partner with and leverage resources of the NGI community to incorporate new networking technologies and capabilities into applications to improve the R&D and service delivery to the public and private sectors. The essential and common features required by applications and demonstrated by this program will be identified and included in the feature set available via the NGI.   The following sections describe the NGI Goal 3 implementation for the agencies included in the Congressional FY 1998 NGI appropriations. DoE is not a formal participant in the NGI in FY 1998. The Administration plans to propose adding DoE as a formal participant beginning in FY 1999. DOE2000 applications, which include national collaboratories, advanced computational testing and simulation, and pilot projects possess many of the same requirements as NGI applications. Appendix E provides more information about DoE's applications and their relevance to the goals of the NGI.
4.2 Application Selection and Coordination	Application Selection and Coordination
4.2.1 NGI Applications Selection Process	NGI Applications Selection Process   NGI applications are selected through four interrelated applications identification processes, each with its own rationale, selection criteria, and funding approaches: (1) NGI funded agency missions, (2) NGI affinity groups, (3) Federal Information Services Applications Council, and (4) broader communities. These four processes together result in lists of candidate applications that are then sorted and ultimately selected according to criteria including resource requirements and benefit to the NGI program, the funding agencies, and the Nation. The overall NGI applications selection process is described in the following sections (see Figure 5).     Figure 5.  NGI Applications Selection Process.
4.2.1.1 NGI funded Agency Missions	NGI funded Agency Missions   Each participating agency identifies its mission applications of interest. These applications are important to the agency mission and are such that the NGI's increased networking functionality and performance are needed in order for the applications to be implemented. These application candidates are identified within the agencies and brought to the NGI program by agency champions. NGI funded agencies are also responsible for outreach to other CIC R&D agencies that are outside the initial set of NGI funded agencies, to encourage these other agencies to identify, fund, develop, and demonstrate their own mission applications within the context of NGI. A key means for this outreach is agency participation in NGI discipline affinity groups.
4.2.1.2 NGI Affinity Groups	NGI Affinity Groups   NGI applications are coordinated by NGI affinity groups. These groups are identified in discipline areas such as health care and environment, and also in technology areas such as collaboration and remote operations. Each group will coordinate applications development for its area of interest, as well as harmonize the requirements its applications need, from NGI Goals 1 and 2.   The affinity groups are responsible for outreach to their own communities of interest; for example, the health care affinity group would not focus solely on coordinating the health care related applications brought by its agency participants, but would spend some effort to identify the best candidates throughout its discipline area and to reach out to the broader health care community in search of the best health care related applications for the NGI. The result is the identification of applications that are proposed for formal NGI selection. More detail on the NGI affinity groups is provided in subsequent sections.
4.2.1.3 Applications Council	Federal Information Services Applications Council   The Federal Information Services Applications Council, which reports to the Subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications (CIC) of the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Technology (CT), seeks to provide outreach to the non-CIC R&D agencies. The Council will help to identify applications that are input either to NGI affinity groups or to mission agencies for coordination and support. Affinity groups may also be established at the Council's suggestion.
4.2.1.4 Broader Communities	Broader Communities   The processes are intended to serve the interests of the Federal agencies in carrying out their legislated mandates. However, it is recognized that many innovative NGI applications will come out of non-Federal communities, or at least will not be identified by the applications identification processes identified above. For example, the World Wide Web was developed initially with government funding but did not derive specifically from mission requirements, and it had an effect far beyond the expectations of the funding agencies. Many other successful applications are developed completely without government funding.   Several opportunities exist for the best applications, independent of source, to be proposed as candidates for NGI selection, including solicitations by agencies using procedures such as Broad Area Announcements (BAAs) and Cooperative Agreement Notices (CANs), as well as outreach programs coordinated with broader communities such as Internet2 and Highway 1.
4.2.2 Funding	Funding   Applications are funded by a variety of means, consistent with the four applications identification processes above. It is understood that most of the resources applications must come from sources outside of the NGI program itself. The contribution by NGI to these applications is intended to enable the applications to be implemented within the NGI framework and demonstrated within the NGI context. Nevertheless, NGI will play an active role in identifying applications requiring NGI resources. NGI funded mission agencies will have specifically targeted funding that is earmarked for supporting their advanced program needs.   Applications coordinated by NGI affinity groups will be worked within the participating agencies and organizations to identify the funding approach that will provide adequate resources for the development of the application. Broad community announcements will specify the amount of funding or cost sharing available for applications development. NGI funding will be available from the NGI funded agencies to meet most if not all of the NGI support requirements of the applications, including network connectivity provided within the resource limitations of Goal 2 and including network services and technologies developed by Goal 1. The agreement of Goals 1 and 2 to provide the needed support is part of the final selection and go-ahead process (see Applications Support Function below).
4.2.3 Prioritization Schemata	Prioritization Schemata   Applications proposed as candidates by any of the four applications identification processes described above will be evaluated for funding and implementation mainly by three areas of characterization: NGI criteria, funding approach, and technology expectation. NGI criteria represent the extent to which the application fulfills the identified purposes of the NGI program, namely, to showcase applications that meet important national needs and which require the success of Goals 1 and 2 in order to be implemented. The NGI criteria are elaborated below. Funding approach represents the extent to which adequate funding will be assured, both funding for the application development itself, as well as funding for the integration of the application within the NGI network, demonstration of the application, and carrying out of the technology transfer approach if the application demonstration is successful. Technology expectation is the degree to which the application-defined technology plan satisfies the NGI technology requirements, including the defined approaches for demonstration, evaluation, validation, scalability, and deployment or commercialization of the resulting capability. Agencies, the engineering teams of Goals 1 and 2, and the affinity groups will apply these prioritization schemata iteratively to help define and clarify the specifications and ultimately make the final selections of the applications for NGI implementation.
4.2.4 NGI Criteria	NGI Criteria   This program will select partnerships for application demonstrations and testbeds that not only meet critical governmental needs, but also provide robust, complete tests of technologies that are extensible and adaptable to other applications. In addition, the program will select applications as the underlying networking technologies begin to enable the necessary infrastructure. Point design studies can determine the maturity of the suite of required network services.   The requirements for selected applications are: The application domain is an important Federal mission and is recognized by the public as important. The application demonstration requires high performance internetworking technologies and services that will result from NGI R&D. The networking concepts and technologies embodied in the application testbed are extensible to other application domains and scalable to the future commercial Internet. The application community will supply resources for the application specific technologies component of the testbed. Applications meeting these requirements will be prioritized on the following basis: Resource use and benefit The timely availability of advanced network speed or services The degree to which the application stresses the network technologies being developed in other parts of the initiative The degree to which the application's technology plan satisfies the NGI technology requirements including the defined approaches for demonstration, evaluation, validation, scalability, and deployment or commercialization of the resulting capability
4.2.5 Applications Support Function	Applications Support Function   Each candidate application proposal will come with a defined set of support requirements needed from NGI Goals 1 and 2, that is, the site connectivity and performance requirements needed, as well as the qualities of service, other network services, security services, and middleware products required for the application to be implemented. This candidate set of requirements will be iterated with the tentative plans being developed by Goals 1 and 2, utilizing an Applications Support Function defined by the NGI Implementation Team.   This Applications Support Function will consist of technical support staff, Web site information resources, agency resources, and defined procedures by which a preliminary NGI Application Support Plan and Agreement (pNASPA) is developed. After this pNASPA is iterated through the involved agencies, affinity groups, and NGI support functions, the process results in a final application-specification package that is formally approved or disapproved by the NGI program. At the time of approval, the "p" is removed and the NASPA becomes the support plan and agreement defining each NGI agency and external organization role in supporting the application through the implementation, integration, demonstration, and technology transfer phases.