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NGI Implementation Plan
Section 4: Revolutionary Applications |
 
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4. Goal 3
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Goal 3: Revolutionary Applications (continued) |
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4.2 Application Selection and Coordination
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Application Selection and Coordination (continued) |
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4.2.6 Application Affinity Groups
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Applications Affinity Groups Affinity groups are established where a number of interests need to be coordinated. Applications that are important to only one agency such as national security for DoD and aerospace engineering for NASA, are handled within that agency and do not require affinity group coordination. Affinity groups have one of two characteristics. First are the disciplinary affinity groups (see Figure 6). These are a collection of end-user organizations that share common interests such as health care, education, or environment. They collaborate because they recognize that their applications have a great deal in common; and that by collaboration each will realize its goals more efficiently and effectively. Second, are the technology affinity groups. These groups have as their mission to coordinate and develop the middleware or tools that lie among the network and the applications. For example, many applications require the ability to collaborate over the NGI. Therefore, a collaborative tools affinity group has been established to minimize duplication and to maximize efficiency. They are to ensure that collaboration tools developed by one application are useful to all. Also, there are two technology groups whose purpose is to coordinate with Goals 1 and 2. Their members are drawn from the other groups as needed.
Each area is reviewed by an expert working group called an affinity group to develop a cross discipline/technology matrix as shown below.
Figure 6. Sample NGI cross-discipline affinity groups and corresponding applications technology affinity groups matrix. The chairs of the affinity groups will work together to provide unified recommendations and requirements to Goals 1 and 2. Key chairs and experts will be part of the NGI Implementation Team established in the Management and Coordination section of the Executive Summary. Unified recommendations of the affinity groups will be considered authoritative as to the degree to which a candidate's application fulfills the NGI criteria and so will be given considerable weight in site selection and service phasing decisions. Discipline affinity groups have a number of common activities and outputs including to:
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4.2.6.1 Disciplinary Affinity Groups
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Disciplinary Affinity Groups Health Care Agencies: NIH, AHCPR, NASA Scope: The scope of the health care affinity group includes NGI applications that have relevance to the areas of clinical medicine, patient health status, public health, and the health education of professionals as well as the lay public. Many of these NGI applications fall into the categories of advanced telemedicine, telehealth, and distance learning or control applications. They would generally require the transfer of many gigabits of data in close to real time such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) scan studies. Other applications require the transfer of smaller amounts of data but with QoS considerations such as very tight control of latency or jitter (for example, echocardiography, angiography, nystagmus gait analysis and functional MRI). Still other applications require the transfer of very detailed images within a reasonable time such as pathology and mammography. Many of these applications require the retrieval of reference multimedia data from libraries. The availability of the NGI will lead to a whole new set of telepresence applications that are based on the ability to control, feel, and manipulate devices at a distance. Applications already being developed include remote microscopy for pathology, remote monitoring, and control of devices for home health care. Eventually, these advances may even lead to telesurgery. All health care applications have a strong security and confidentiality component. Activities: The health care affinity group will focus on outreach to the health care community, much of which is just discovering the advantages and efficiencies afforded through the use of advanced communications technologies, such as the Internet. The largest use of the Web is the search for health information. Getting medical practices connected, especially in rural areas, is still a formidable problem. The health care affinity group will advocate progress in these areas while encouraging, publicizing, and showcasing advanced patient care applications that make use of the evolving NGI capabilities. Potential Applications: Telemedicine applications involving highly detailed images (pathology and mammography), real time interactivity (MRI or PET scan studies) and multimedia reference libraries including patient records. Telepresence applications for remote manipulation, feel, and control, as well as home health care. Environment Agencies: NASA, NSF, NOAA, EPA, DoI, USDA Scope: Environmental science and services are advancing rapidly based on two related facts. First, our ability to observe the environment is expanding rapidly. Earth based radars, advanced satellite observing systems, and ocean tomography each provide dramatic increases in available environmental data approaching a petabyte per year in the aggregate. Second, advancing computer technology is leading to larger models with large data outputs that can often be best analyzed by advanced immersive environments. These both require the speed and services of the NGI to be successful. Environmental applications span the ocean, atmosphere, and land from short term weather forecasts to long term climate predictions. This includes environmental modeling for hazardous spill/release tracking, pollution transport, and management of Federal environmental resources. Activities: In addition to the common activities identified above, the environment affinity group will focus on those aspects of the NGI that will improve data and information sharing, and model development across the many agencies working in this domain. The group will coordinate closely with the crisis response affinity group to ensure that environmental observations and models are useful in crisis situations. It will also coordinate closely with the basic sciences group to ensure that collaboration and remote operation technologies are shared across both domains. Potential Applications: Climate collaboratory; Chesapeake Bay virtual environment; distributed modeling laboratory for mesoscale meteorological studies; and real time environmental data via the NGI. Education Agencies: DoEd, NASA, NSF Scope: Numerous educational initiatives are underway in the Department of Education (DoEd) including the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, Technology Innovation Challenge Grants, and several activities that target universal access in education. These activities, coupled with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) discounts for schools and libraries that total $2.25 billion annually lay the foundation for immediate connectivity to the classroom and for the development of innovative education content for the next generation of networked education applications. NGI, working through the agencies and the Subcommittee on CIC R&D Education, Training and Human Resources Working Group (ETHR), will build on this foundation to reach out and develop exciting new applications. Activities: Most education is carried out at the state and local level, hence outreach to the broadest possible community will be a priority for this group. Potential Applications: Distance learning; universal access. Manufacturing Agencies: NIST, NASA U.S. manufacturers are implementing new organizational models, new engineering and manufacturing processes; incorporating new materials; and adopting new quality methods in efforts to achieve best-in-class performance. Implementing any of these efforts in a single manufacturing facility affects the information technology infrastructure of that facility. When these efforts are implemented over a geographically distributed enterprise, supply chain, or virtual enterprise, the global information network becomes the constraining factor determining the degree to which information-intensive efforts are realized. Fully realizing these efforts depends on the successful deployment of a network infrastructure that provides reliable data transfer, deterministic propagation delay, privacy, and a variety of data capacities. Scope: The manufacturing affinity group will focus on applications representative of business activities that manufacturers will expect to be enabled by the NGI. Typical activities could include establishment of virtual organizations, collaborative product/process design and engineering, remote equipment control and monitoring, managing distributed workflows, accessing distributed manufacturing data, and sharing software environments. Activities: The principal activities of the manufacturing affinity group will be to identify agency manufacturing applications, analyze manufacturing applications for network and services requirements, and collate those requirements for consideration by other NGI working groups. In addition, it will help to identify commonalties among applications to enable leveraging among them. Potential Applications: Characterization, remote access, and simulation of hexapod machines; telerobotic operation of scanning probe microscopes. Crisis Management Agencies: FEMA, NOAA, NASA, DoD/DARPA, USGS, DoI, CEOS, G-7/GEMINI, GDIN NOAA/NESDIS Scope: Numerous crisis (disaster) programs and projects are underway within the U.S. In many Federal agencies there are projects related to some aspect of crisis management or disasters, including prediction, forecasting, monitoring, response, assessment, mitigation, relief coordination, and intervention/assistance. Projects are being developed and funded to meet an often specific (narrow) objective and use limited resources (that is, those of the particular agency or in some cases several cooperating agencies). This is in part because today's telecommunications speeds and services cannot meet the broader requirements that many of these projects could implement. Regardless of current limitations, many of these applications are planning for NGI-type services. They have goals to expand the accessibility and increase the utilization of the vast array of technology, services, and information currently within the Federal government (as well as those technologies and services being planned) to significantly improve the nation's forecasting, preparedness, and response to crisis management and disaster situations. Activities: The crisis management affinity group has perhaps the most difficult networking requirements. This will require tight collaboration with the engineering teams. The wide variety of governmental organizations involved in crisis management requires close coordination with the involved organizations, and with all national information assets. Potential Applications: Collaboration under crisis conditions; data access and fusion under crisis conditions; security and privacy policies and enforcement; nomadic computing and network management in a crisis. Basic Science Agencies: NSF, NOAA, NASA, NCRR Scope: The discipline of conducting scientific research has been undergoing a sometimes subtle, but accelerating, evolution. Advances in computing and communications technology are being assimilated into the scientific environment and are bringing changes in how scientists interact with their peers, their data, and their facilities. An era in which new paradigms of science are possible is approaching. It is important to enable applications that clearly demonstrate that it is possible to do science in new ways, through NGI technology, ways that would not have been possible otherwise. Activities: The Basic Science Group will focus on applications that provide insights into fundamental science and associated phenomena. Criteria for selection of applications specific to this discipline will be developed. Organization of the basic science affinity group is self-selecting in the initial formation, and membership is derived from representatives of the agency mission critical and signature applications. Federal Information Services Agencies: Various Scope: These applications include the full range of advanced information services of the government. They potentially span the full range of governmental levels. This group will link the providers of Federal information services and the networking research community to provide the early adopters of the information services community with the opportunity to help guide the services of the NGI and to explore the new services these advanced capabilities enable. A few applications require the highest bandwidths, but many in this domain require the advanced services that support security, privacy, collaboration, and distributed knowledge discovery. Activities: Most Federal information service providers are fully occupied implementing the technologies available today, hence only a few are prepared to participate in the NGI. This affinity group will need to strongly market the program to the intended community. Potential Applications: Storage, archival, and information access; information integration; data mining; electronic commerce. |
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4.2.6.2 Technology Affinity Groups
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Technology Affinity Groups Technology affinity groups have a number of common activities and outputs, including:
Agencies: NIST, NASA Scope: The use of collaborative technologies is critical to the success of a broad range of government projects. These technologies include, for example, network based videoconferencing, shared documents and notebooks, shared databases, and remote access to shared computers and research facilities. Together, these technologies permit scientists, engineers, and administrative staff to work together on projects without regard to physical location. The collaboration working group will provide guidance on the technology needs for collaborative applications and on the availability of existing and future tools to meet those needs. The group will be composed of people who are involved in collaborative applications in many Federal agencies. Activities: In particular, the working group will:
Distributed Computing Agencies: NSF, NASA Scope: The Internet is more than just a communication medium: it is also a means by which computation can be integrated with human activities. Many proposed NGI applications depend on the ability to access, in a coordinated fashion, remote computers, storage systems, databases, scientific instruments, advanced display devices, and other resources. Distributed computing technologies will allow this access to occur in a straightforward, efficient, and secure way. Distributed computing is about more than remote procedure calls (RPCs). The scale and heterogeneity of the Internet means that applications also need to be able to locate and schedule resources (including networks); determine properties of resources; configure resources and computations; support diverse communication mechanisms, including RPC, message passing, streaming video, and multicast; access and manipulate distributed data stored in diverse forms; monitor and manage computations, etc. Emerging computational models based on mobile agents introduce additional issues. A number of approaches have been proposed that seek to provide these capabilities. However, each seems a partial solution, and none has been tested on the scale of the national scale "computational grids" that we expect to evolve in the future. Perhaps as a result, we see little agreement in specifics, and significant obstacles to the large scale experiments that might accelerate progress. Activities:
Agencies: NSF, NASA, NIH Scope: This topic has evolved rapidly to become a rich field yet one that has not fully matured. Even the term "digital library" is being defined and redefined as capabilities not available in traditional libraries are being developed and their effect better understood. For example, the contour map on the page of a book can be turned into a "fly-over," and information from a variety of sources about one place -- be it a place on the map or in the brain -- can be integrated into a three-dimensional picture from which future (or past) behavior can be simulated. As digital libraries technologies mature and are disseminated, and as the size of the national, in fact the worldwide, digital library grows, every citizen will become able to take out a "book" from any library or interactively visit any museum. They are already being used in crisis response; these libraries contain images of how things were prior to natural disasters that can be quickly accessed by response teams. Their application will span and expand human knowledge. These uses will require NGI speed and extent. Digital libraries require distributed mass storage systems for storing their repositories; high performance networking for users to access content, which often takes the form of multiple multimedia objects; and high performance computing to manipulate the data (for example, to move around three-dimensional data sets such as environmental or biomedical models). Activities: Future activities will build on the ones that have been conducted over the last several years. Indeed, one major reason for the rapid developments in digital libraries is the NSF/DARPA/NASA Joint Digital Libraries initiative. Six university led consortia that include libraries, museums, publishers, schools, and computing and communications industry companies are conducting R&D in digital libraries technologies in this 1995 to 1998 effort. The NGI digital libraries affinity group will coordinate these activities with the needs of the NGI applications to ensure that digital library technologies will operate over the NGI and integrate with the applications. Remote Operations Agencies: NIST, NASA, NIH, NSF Scope: Many proposed NGI applications involve the remote monitoring of a machine, process, environment or crisis situation. The term "remote operations" implies the ability of the remote user to effect a change in what is being monitored and see results in a timely fashion. This ability to effect change can range from the simple setting of a few key parameters to taking remote control of some device at a very low level such as force feedback. The technologies and abilities being developed for NGI come into play at all these levels. Privacy and security issues are key when operating remote, unique devices or gathering proprietary information on the performance of a product. The development of collaboratories often includes remote operation of devices at various levels of control. The high bandwidth and deterministic nature of communications using NGI network technology is required for remote control of high-control bandwidth applications such as force reflection (remote surgery, bomb dismantling) or remote diagnostics or calibrations. An initial taxonomy of applications based on latency requirements is shown below. The Level 3 and 4 applications are achievable using current Internet technology, but suffer from bandwidth limitations and the nondeterministic latencies. Level 1 and 2 applications are expected to require deterministic communications. It is envisioned that these applications will first request and then determine the end-to-end network latency, incorporating this delay into their control law calculations. The maximum delay tolerable is a function of the control laws being used and the physical plant being controlled. Certain Level 1 applications may require a minimum number of switch delays or be otherwise limited by speed of light considerations to local users rather than coast-to-coast operation.
Activities: The remote operations affinity group will initially focus on exploring the minimum requirements of testbed applications and will seek to encompass all levels of potential remote operations. In conjunction with this effort and in concert with the other affinity groups, we will seek to develop a taxonomy of remote operations with respect to their NGI services and mechanisms for the application to request and verify that the proper services (bandwidth, latency, user validation) are in place before allowing the remote use of what are often unique national resources. Security and Privacy Agencies: NIST, NASA Scope: Application level security plays a much broader role than does infrastructure security, IP-level security, and system level security. Although the lower levels of security are essential to protecting the computing and communications infrastructure, Application level security is as much (or more) about enforcing agreements among "legitimate" users as it is about protection. Application level security is the mechanism that will enable widely distributed enterprise. It must provide, for example, for expressing use conditions on data, services, and resources; expressions of authorization and attributes; and payment mechanisms. It also must provide the mechanisms for fine grained protection of these assets, assuming that the infrastructure is secured. Several mechanisms -- security architectures, infrastructure, and technology -- have been proposed for Application level security, with naming authority and third party trust mechanisms, public key cryptography, and cryptographically signed certificates as general, common threads, but with limited, or only emerging, agreement on specifics. Activities: The following activities will be pursued in coordination with the broad community outside NGI that is concerned with privacy and security, including the Subcommittee on CIC R&D High Confidence Systems Working Group.
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4.3 Candidate Applications
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Candidate Applications Suggested demonstrations cover a wide range of capabilities: from time critical applications such as crisis and national security responses to broad collaboration in areas as diverse as health care, education, and research. Telemedicine extends collaboration adding robustness, security, and reliability. Application testbeds serve as platforms for proof-of-concept demonstrations. They tie together networking technologies, test the completeness of NGI protocols, and force the technologies to operate in real situations. By forcing technologies to work together in complex situations, applications stress the cooperability and interoperability of the developing suite of advanced networking services. In addition, effective demonstrations showcase new network capabilities, resulting in new acceptance and even enthusiasm for these important advances. |
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4.3.1 Potential Applications
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Potential Applications Health Care: Doctors at university medical centers will use large archives of radiology images to identify the patterns and features associated with a particular disease. With remote access to supercomputers, they will also be able to improve the accuracy of mammography by detecting subtle changes in three-dimensional images. Crisis Management, Crisis Response: Crisis managers will access a wide range of information under the most difficult and unpredictable circumstances. Networks will be self-configuring to enable rapid return of services after a disaster; and information from multiple levels of government and the public sector will be immediately available. The results of remote models will be available for failure diagnosis and prediction of effects during natural or man-made disasters. Education, Distance Education: Universities are now experimenting with technologies such as two-way video to remote sites, VCR-like replay of past classes, modeling and simulation, collaborative environments, and on-line access to interactive, multimedia instructional software. Distance education will improve the ability of universities to serve working Americans who want new skills but who cannot attend a class at a fixed time during the week. Basic Science, Scientific Research: Scientists and engineers across the country will be able to work with each other and access remote scientific facilities as if they were in the same building. "Collaboratories" that combine videoconferencing, shared virtual work spaces, networked scientific facilities, and databases will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our national research enterprise. Environment: Climate Research: Scientists, researchers, and policy makers will be able to examine the effects of proposed actions on the long term evolution of our environment. Models will become available to and usable by all interested users. Health Care: Biomedical Research: Researchers will be able to solve problems in large scale DNA sequencing and gene identification that were previously impossible, opening the door to breakthroughs in curing human genetic diseases. Environment: Environmental Monitoring: Researchers are constructing virtual worlds to model and monitor defined ecosystems. For example, one project models the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, which serves as a nursery area for many commercially important species. Manufacturing: Collaborative engineering, distributed data sharing, and teleoperation of unique manufacturing resources will dramatically reduce the time required to develop new, higher quality products in distributed enterprises and in virtual enterprises. Enhancing manufacturing applications such as design, analysis, modeling, simulation, virtual reality, equipment/process control, and monitoring with NGI-based capabilities will enable system-wide improvements for geographically distributed manufacturers, suppliers, and customers. |
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4.3.2 Initial Candidate Applications
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Initial Candidate Applications The following initial candidate applications have been developed within individual agencies. As the program progresses and the number of applications increases five-fold or more, applications that cut across multiple agencies and even multiple sectors will be encouraged. NASA Applications: NASA instrument quality assurance; instrument support terminal; NASA echocardiography; distributed image spreadsheet; collaborative simulation; virtual simulation. NIH Applications: Radiology consultation workstation; distributed positron emission tomography (PET) imaging; Real time telemedicine; high resolution imaging telemedicine; remote control telemedicine; medical image reference libraries. NIST Applications: Telerobotic operation of scanning tunneling microscopes; characterization remote access and simulation of hexapod machines. NOAA Applications: Crisis management -- a collection of generic requirements advanced numerical weather forecasting. NSF Applications: Chesapeake virtual environment; distributed modeling laboratory for mesoscale meteorological studies; real time environmental data via the NGI. |
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4.4 Milestones
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Milestones
Metrics
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