Cost
Michael Wertheimer emphasized working with small prototypes at first, which are likely to demonstrate failures. If the prototype is small enough that a new version, which addresses the failure, is not expensive, incremental improvement would be the way to control costs. He mentioned that the initial costs, "well under $5 million", will be for servers, software licenses and design. The greatest design challenge will be achieving the needed security. DNI policy is to have A-Space rely, as much as possible, on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software.
A service oriented architecture (SOA) was the basic technical mode for building A-space. Eventually, that will allow analysts and developers to write or install their own widgets (i.e., small customized programs) onto their portal page. Widgets might first access Google Maps content, then attach classified layers to a map that could potentially overlay anti-aircraft missile sites with known bunkers. The intelligence community is already blogging, and A-Space could therefore take advantage of RSS feeds for blog content, among other things.
It will be implemented as a portal that includes a Web-based word processing tool akin to GoogleDocs, a wiki-based intelligence community encyclopedia and access to three "huge, terabyte databases" of "raw" (i.e., not yet evaluated) data for analysts to examine. It will be scaled for 10,000 users at day one.
Read more about this topic: A-Space
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.”
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“It may cost me twenty thousand francs; but for twenty thousand francs, I will have the right to rail against the iniquity of humanity, and to devote to it my eternal hatred.”
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“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
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