The Next Step in Information Sharing: The Distributed Alerts Dissemination Backbone

As new national security threats have emerged, the major requirement for information management has changed from a "need to know" to a "need to share". This has led to numerous government initiatives to fuse data from heterogeneous sources to provide a robust operational picture for end users. These efforts are hindered by a lack of integration mechanisms between participating agencies. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have proposed standards for capturing and distributing information. This paper presents factors driving this environment and discusses an architecture for it, the Distributed Alerts Dissemination Backbone (DADB). DADB is based on open standards and is designed to disseminate information to a geographically diverse Community of Interest (COI). It also provides mechanisms for information translation while on route to its final destination. This paper also examines the COI policy needed for information distribution.