Treaty portal to get power search

Members of the U.S. arms control community will soon be able to go online

to find treaty information, regardless of where it resides, with an intelligent

search function being built into the State Department's new Treaty Information

portal.

State's Bureau of Verification and Compliance planned to announce today

the selection of Excalibur Technologies Corp., to provide the advanced search

function for the portal through the company's RetrievalWare technology.

The new system, which will be deployed on the Defense Department's Secret

Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) worldwide intranet, will provide

arms control community members with a single point of access to information

on treaties, compliance, inspection and other mission-critical arms treaty

data, said Ned Williams, data repository manager at the Bureau of Verification

and Compliance.

The portal is scheduled to be up and running by late September.

The Bureau of Verification and Compliance is responsible for the overall

supervision, including oversight of policy and resources, of all matters

relating to verification and compliance with international arms control,

nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements and commitments.

Excalibur, based in Vienna, Va., is a provider of content management solutions

for indexing and retrieving text, video and images via the Internet and

intranets. RetrievalWare is an intelligent search system that allows flexibility

and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets.

It enables people to index and search a wide range of distributed information

resources, including text files; HTML documents; relational database tables;

more than 200 proprietary document formats, including word processors and

publishing systems; and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities

include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching and query-by-example.

"Currently, they basically have diverse ways of getting information, not

one global search," said Mark Myers, director of product marketing at Excalibur.

"Our software ties all the pieces together...and adds a level of security

so for secure documents only certain individuals or groups can see them."

Myers said RetrievalWare's security features are based on the permissions

assigned to people through the various file systems being used to store

the information. When the documents are indexed, those preferences, usernames

and passwords are also included so only people with proper security clearances

get access to specific classified data.

Excalibur's federal customers include the Air Force Research Laboratory,

the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Joints Chiefs

of Staff, the Justice Technology Information Network, the National Institutes

of Health, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Air Force, the Army and the

Navy.