INTRODUCTION
The Open Source Information System (OSIS) is an electronic network for accessing and sharing unclassified and open source information and value added services among Intelligence Community agencies and related organizations. MITRE has been working with the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO) for over three years to design and field OSIS. The team has been composed of members from four MITRE technical centers: the Networking Technical Center, the Security Technical Center, the Advanced Information systems Center, and the Open Systems Center. We discovered that no technical center had all the answers, and it indeed took the work and knowledge of those four centers to come up with an integrated solution.

What is open source information? Open source information is any unclassified information, in any medium, that is generally available to the public, even if its distribution is limited. It includes but is not limited to the traditional "gray literature" of conference proceedings, technical reports, etc. Television documentaries and other programs, commercial CD-ROM products, newspapers, maps, journals, advertising brochures, magazines and the Internet's vast holdings are all open source information resources.

OSIS RESOURCES What kinds of open source information can authorized users get through OSIS? OSIS offers on-line access to the unclassified information resources of participating US Government agencies. For example, Janes Electronic Library of 24 titles provides up-to-date information on military equipment, weapons systems, and defense products worldwide. The CIRC Database (Central Information Reference and Control) is a database of over 10 million titles on scientific and technical topics, including patents, standards, military equipment and systems. The Conference Database is a source of upcoming symposia, congresses, conventions, etc., in the areas of science, technology, engineering, politics, and economics.

IC ROSE is a database service providing searchable text articles from hundreds of periodicals on a wide range of subjects. FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Information Service) products are on-line, including the Daily Reports, Science & Technology Perspectives, Trends, and Pacific Rim Economic Review. The TEL (Technical Equipment List) is an electronic index to over 100,000 brochures and manuals on telecommunications and related equipment. The TCOM (Telecommunications) database contains abstracts and complete articles on telecommunications related topics. The Defense Mapping Agency's DTED (Digital Terrain Elevation Data) is the on-line map collection providing worldwide coverage (you should see their 500 CD-ROM jukebox!). Additionally, commercial datasources such as Oxford Analytica have been purchased for intelligence community use and reside on OSIS. There are also unclassified library holdings of several OSIS member agencies, including Defense Intelligence Agency, on OSIS. In addition to open source information, OSIS offers specialized software and other tools to assist users in analytical and graphical interpretations of data.

For example, OSIS currently makes available the National Air Intelligence Center's (NAIC) SYSTRAN ® machine translation (MT) capability to provide "real time" rough translations of foreign language information. MITRE's creation of a World Wide Web (WWW) front-end for MT allows the inclusion of information directly from WWW sites (see our example of this capability in the next section).

Language training materials and courseware from the Center for Advancement of Language Learning (CALL) are available on OSIS. Through "hot links", OSIS will connect users directly to key additional Federal open source resources, such as the DTIC (Defense Technical Information Center) and the NTIS (National Technical Information Service), each of which offers unique open source databases and other products and services. At the end of 1996, users had access to more than thirty open source information products and tools via OSIS.

So much for "finished" intelligence products and tools. OSIS also provides its users with direct, yet protected, access to the Internet and its broad range of worldwide open source information resources. For common Internet applications (Web Browsers, Net News readers, telnet and FTP), OSIS uses proxies. Since these proxies give seamless access to the Internet, there is no difference to the user between surfing OSIS and surfing the Internet.

AN APPLICATION OF OSIS Let's look at a prime example of the power of combining OSIS tools and the Internet access. Remember the OSIS machine translation tool? Well, here's how to use it with the World Wide Web: the OSIS user surfs the Internet to find a foreign language magazine or newspaper online with headlines that are Web links. Our example shows a German online magazine "Journal fur Deutschland". The user copies the Universal Resource Locator (URL) for the paper, brings up the NAIC MT page, and pastes in the URL. Note that you could paste in paragraphs of free text instead of Web references. You hit the Translate button, and shortly thereafter you are looking at an English version of the newspaper page with intact URLs that you can click on to progress further! OK, so it's not Shakespeare, but you can tell what the stories are about. Also, note that only text is translated; web logos and graphics are left unchanged. Hyperlinks are preserved.

OSIS BEHIND THE SCENES If we back up a bit and look behind the scenes, just what is OSIS?

• To the Network Technical Center, it is a communication infrastructure with routing plans, split Domain Name Service, proven technology, and strong management.
• To the Security Technical Center, it is an enclave of restricted-access information that is protected by a security policy, risk assessment, and application firewalls.
• To the Open Systems Center and Advanced Information Systems Center, it is a client-server system of information repositories and advanced information services and tools accessed through a common Web-based user interface.

Each view of OSIS has multiple dimensions, numerous technologies, and diverse methodologies. The combined strengths of the technical centers made possible the deployment of OSIS in less than two years. Along the way, a fundamental cultural change occurred towards Internet access and towards cooperation among the participating intelligence agencies. While two is a large number in computer years, these socio-political changes take real time. Now we accept Internet access, Web browsing, and security firewalls as the norm. In 1993, these were fledgling technologies with many associated uncertainties and threats.

Early in the project, the focus was on defining and creating infrastructure (connectivity, networks, firewalls, servers, and community self-help). The MITRE team led the efforts in technical development, component prototyping, and administrator training for the first 16 OSIS sites. New technologies are still being added to the firewalls. The most recent example is a current effort to support the Defense Message System with its X.400 messaging and X.500 directory services.

Once a stable and secure network was in place, the focus changed to address the usability of OSIS. An enhanced design for an Intelligence Community unclassified intranet was defined and implemented that improved usability and further opened communication among the agencies. Today, OSIS accounts are a popular commodity. New sites are being added, dial-in facilities are expanding, and OSIS is available from the European Theater to the Pacific Rim. During 1997, two MITRE-developed proof-of-concept capabilities will be piloted on OSIS. One is the Open source Research Network (OSRN), which allows OSIS analytic users to register open source information needs and obtain responses. The other is the Broadcast News Navigator (BNN), which enables users to browse current and past broadcast news stories by viewing video and closed-caption text. The latter of these capabilities is based on MITRE Sponsored Research multimedia initiatives.

The focus has continued to shift and now is clearly set on expanding the information content available through OSIS. Discussions with potential producers of open source information are occurring daily. We eagerly await the new offerings they will bring. In addition, OSIS may expand beyond United States agencies. Work is underway at MITRE to facilitate the internationalization of OSIS.

CONCLUSION A running joke within the Intelligence Community is that to Intelink (the classified intelligence web), OSIS is Intelink-U (for unclassified). But on the COSPO side of this friendly rivalry, Intelink is known as OSIS-S (for secret). Although OSIS does offer 1-800 dial-in access, and although it faces a different threat than Intelink does, it can still leverage lessons learned from Intelink (such as getting user-helpful search facilities in place early). The point is that OSIS is many things to many people because it has a rich infrastructure, a set of problem solutions, and a growth potential as boundless as the Internet it accesses.

For more information, please contact Walt Lazear using the employee directory.