Innovative Information System Technologies

Publish-subscribe-query systems have been evolving from costly, monolithic, proprietary applications into a client-server model based on web services. More recently, distributed peer-to-peer systems based on undifferentiated end-user systems have beenexplored. All of these approaches tend to suffer from inherent architectural scalability limits.Based on its experience in building business-to-business and Internet applications, Adeptech Systems, Inc. instead proposes a distributed, modular server-to-server architecture based on object routers and publish-subscribe-query brokers. Server-to-servercommunications will use Beryllium, a native peer-to-peer communications protocol based on BEEP which offers much lower latency and overhead than systems layered on HTTP. Query and object routing operations will benefit from indexing technologies provenin extremely large-scale Internet Search applications. Redundant clusters of publish-subscribe-query brokers will provide user-related services such as managing and aggregating subscriptions, providing a standard web interface to users, and ensuringreliable delivery and publications of objects in accordance with security policies. We propose to study the feasibility and scalability, and to demonstrate a proof of concept of key portions of the proposed architecture and its applicability as a JBIsolution. ASI's proposed architecture is intended to address a number of difficult problems relevant to the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) -- most critically, efficient publish-subscribe and query operations in support of a large-scale distributedinformation repository. We believe that the same architecture would have equally strong commercial potential for implementing information repository and workflow applications used by many large organizations.