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Washington Technologies White Papers

Washington Technologies White Papers

SGML in the Intranet for the US Intelligence Community: "INTELINK"

Frederick Thomas Martin, Deputy Director, Information Services Group, National Security Agency

The US National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other top agencies (collectively known as the United States Intelligence Community) are significantly improving their intelligence gathering and reporting systems through the development and implementation of advanced technology including networking and international information standards such as SGML.

Intelink is the classified, world wide "Intranet" for the intelligence community. Intelink addresses one of the world's largest data management problems, involving demanding requirements that are at the extreme of what normal enterprises require. Intelink is used by intelligence customers and consumers from the warfighter to the White House and has been "declared as the strategic direction for Community product dissemination systems" by D/SecDef and DCI.

Intelink is currently being used in support of several basic and key functional areas. Perhaps the most significant of these areas is the electronic publishing and distribution of our nation's intelligence reports. "Signals Intelligence" (SIGINT) Reports have gone from the world of reports in only ASCII text to robust multimedia formats with distribution, using SGML, over Intelink.

Within NSA, the reporting and publication of "end-product", or "finished intelligence", was in the recent past a difficult dissemination process, which used hand- and computer-produced hard copy report of text files. Classes of intelligence were "pushed" to the users, or customers. Newer techniques now allow customers to "pull" needed intelligence from SGML data bases thus allowing data re-use as well as rich multi-media materials, all from a controlled, protected, classified community intranet. Now NSA and the Community, is coming full circle in its approach to finished intelligence, once again working towards "pushing" intelligence, although now primarily in electronic form. This is in concert with the latest thinking and trends on World Wide Web applications, and is enabled through the use of data standards, including SGML.


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