Guaranteed Data Integrity in the GIG-NCES Environment

The ASSETT/University of Virginia team, in response to SBIR OSD05-NC3, is designing, developing, and prototyping both a logical and a physical web services oriented architecture focused on providing the warfighter with reliable information in the Guaranteed Data Integrity in the GIG-NCES Environment. Our approach addresses both Information Assurance (IA) and Information Reliability (IR) where IR focuses on assessment of the factual quality of the information and is the specific purpose of this SBIR. Knowing the pedigree (i.e., sources of data and the reliability of those sources and the source’s level of confidence in the data itself is essential to good decision-making. This effort addresses three major issues related to IR, 1) Has the integrity of the data or its metadata been compromised, 2) What level of confidence can be placed in the factual accuracy of the information, and 3) Can we determine if the information being offered by the multiple producers is truly independent or is there common ancestry at lower levels of aggregation? This effort will provide a means of quickly and easily visualizing the pedigree of the information and the lineage of the aggregated data back to its original sources.