Members of the U.S. arms control community will soon be able to go online to find treaty information, regardless of where it resides, with an intelligent search function being built into the State Department's new Treaty Information portal.
State's Bureau of Verification and Compliance planned to announce today the selection of Excalibur Technologies Corp., to provide the advanced search function for the portal through the company's RetrievalWare technology.
The new system, which will be deployed on the Defense Department's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) worldwide intranet, will provide arms control community members with a single point of access to information on treaties, compliance, inspection and other mission-critical arms treaty data, said Ned Williams, data repository manager at the Bureau of Verification and Compliance.
The portal is scheduled to be up and running by late September.
The Bureau of Verification and Compliance is responsible for the overall supervision, including oversight of policy and resources, of all matters relating to verification and compliance with international arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements and commitments.
Excalibur, based in Vienna, Va., is a provider of content management solutions for indexing and retrieving text, video and images via the Internet and intranets. RetrievalWare is an intelligent search system that allows flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets. It enables people to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text files; HTML documents; relational database tables; more than 200 proprietary document formats, including word processors and publishing systems; and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching and query-by-example.
"Currently, they basically have diverse ways of getting information, not one global search," said Mark Myers, director of product marketing at Excalibur. "Our software ties all the pieces together...and adds a level of security so for secure documents only certain individuals or groups can see them."
Myers said RetrievalWare's security features are based on the permissions assigned to people through the various file systems being used to store the information. When the documents are indexed, those preferences, usernames and passwords are also included so only people with proper security clearances get access to specific classified data.
Excalibur's federal customers include the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Technology Information Network, the National Institutes of Health, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.