Seamless and Secure Federation Among Highly and Loosely Connected Infospaces (INFOFED)

This report describes research conducted toward developing a federated approach to interconnecting multiple information spaces to enable data interchange. We propose a set of interfaces to facilitate dynamic, runtime discovery and federation of information spaces. We also report on integrating with the KAoS policy and domain services framework to realize policy-based control over the federation and exchange of information. Our approach allows clients to transparently perform publish, subscribe, and query operations across all the federated information spaces. We have integrated with three existing JBI implementations-- Apollo from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Mercury from General Dynamics and AIMS Advanced Information Management System from Northrop Grumman. Both Mercury and AIMS are independent implementations that comply with the JBI architecture. Most recently, we have integrated with Phoenix, a fully SoA Service-oriented Architecture based approach to information management. As part of this effort, we identified changes that needed to be made to the Phoenix architecture and implementation to support federation, and refactored the federation capabilities into a set of services that can be enabled on demand within Phoenix.