Defense Virtual Information Architecture (DVIA)

The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and CNRI developed the Defense Virtual Information Architecture by leveraging CNRI's Digital Object Architecture and Handle System in combination with existing open standards, to provide an extensible, secure, and federated digital information management system capable of disseminating metadata and data in a secure and context sensitive manner. (A prototype implementation of the DVIA, called the DVIA Registry System (DVIA-RS), is available to DTIC users at http://hdl.handle.net/100.10/ALPHADVIA. An access-restricted version is accessible at http://hdl.handle.net/100.10/ALPHASDVIA, but requires authentication credentials.)

The DVIA-RS prototype demonstrates a "Navigational Search and Discovery" user interface built upon a Secure Contextual Linking Service (SCLS) which dynamically computes context sensitive, authenticated, and authorized search and access over technical reports, their respective metadata, associated multimedia, and archival material retrieval. All requests to the DVIA-RS registry are expressed as OpenURLs and are exclusively processed by the SCLS. The OpenURL standard was chosen for its ability to express complex contextual requests using a set of identified entities, such as who is requesting what operation to be performed on what resource, from where, using which service, from which source. The SCLS dynamically resolves all entity handle IDs into their respective descriptions, references, authentication, and service end points, and uses them all to process the request. The SCLS is, in effect, a dynamic and extensible service-to-resource linker that is at the base of the DVIA-RS's extensibility.

In addition to using the Handle System to identify resources, entities and services, the SCLS uses the Handle System as a PKI, an authorization platform, and as a secure policy identification, registration and distribution system. This enables the DVIA-RS to establish secure, trusted connections to services, and authenticate and authorize queries to restrict who can access which services and/or resources.