The National Information Infrastructure will be many orders of magnitude more powerful than any exsiting information infrastructure. Its creation requires advancing into unknown territory, which in turn requires substantial research and development efforts aimed at scaling up existing information technologies, integrating these information technologies with advanced voice and video communication technologies, and developing new technologies that address key issues such as advanced information storage and retrieval, ease of use, interoperability, dependability and manageability in this integrated setting.
Realizing the vision of the NII will require long-term collaboration among industry, academia and government. A coordinated strategy with complementary investment is needed. The development and deployment of the NII will be carried out by the private sector. The private sector will need to continue to invest in NII-related research and development and will need to create and make available the services and products that will constitute the NII. The role of academia includes conducting research in various NII technologies; partnering with the private sector to transfer the results of that research; prototyping applications and services; and early use and production use in education and research. The government also has several roles to play. First, in the policy arena, government can act as a catalyst for private-sector investment. It can act to remove roadblocks to the implementation of the NII by devising policies that enable the development of a coherent infrastructure while allowing competitive market forces to drive the creation and selection of products that make up the infrastructure and its associated applications. Second, as a large user and provider of information, government can act as an early adopter and a role model to accelerate the widespread use of NII applications and services. Third, as a partner with industry and academia, government can foster and support a long-range research program to address many technical problems that are key to the success of the NII. An appropriate federal research program in which cooperating researchers from many institutions share experiences, approaches, successes and failures will complement substantial industry investment in research and development of needed technologies. This report considers this third role.
In the spring of 1993, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. National Economic Council approached the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) seeking input regarding the direction of federal research and development related to the emergence of an advanced NII. As CSPP considered this request, it enlisted the assistance of the American Electronics Association, the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association, the Computing Research Association, the Cross Industry Working Team, the (private sector) Council on Competitiveness and EDUCOM. Jointly, these organizations formed a Steering Committee and a Program Committee and organized a symposium to address where federal funds for research and development could best be directed to complement the research and development under way in the private sector related to the development and deployment of an NII.
The symposium was organized into nine tracks on the basis of application needs (e.g., security and privacy) and infrastructure imperatives (e.g., interoperability), where new or continuing research initiatives have the potential to overcome current implementation obstacles or produce needed functional or efficiency improvements.
The track co-chairs from industry and academia proposed participants for their tracks with established expertise in the track subject areas. Steering and Program committee members also proposed leading researchers with expertise in various track topic areas and representing a broad cross-section of industry and academia. Representatives of federal government agencies that sponsor research in information technologies produced a list of government participants. In all, 305 nominees participated in the symposium.
Attendees were assigned to specific tracks according to their expertise. An opening plenary session addressed some of the broader technology challenges and pre-competitive research needs particular to health care, manufacturing, education, financial services, and government information and services. Participants were then sequestered for two days to prepare their analysis and recommendations. This report outlines the consensus recommendations that emerged for a federal research and development agenda for the NII. Section B summarizes the opening plenary session and Section C contains the detailed recommendations in each of the 10 topic areas. (One of the nine symposium tracks produced recommendations in two topic areas.)