Volume 10, Number 3 • May/June 2002 • Small Business/SBIR

SBIR Spinoff Benefits Homeland Security

An SBIR spinoff enables emergency response personnel to easily collect, integrate, analyze and share information in real time.

Making the best possible decisions in highly uncertain and time-constrained environments, like relief operations for natural and manmade emergencies, requires communication tools that help individuals and te

ams work together to achieve results that are greater than the sum of the individual actions. System developers at Polexis, Inc., of San Diego, CA, have introduced VIGILYS, a network-centric distributed collaboration and analysis environment tailored to the needs of groups and individuals that will implement the emerging national strategy for homeland security.

VIGILYS is a decentralized application built on event-by-event data-sharing technology that decouples source and destination at multiple layers within the architecture. Participants in the collaboration network do not need prior knowledge about each other’s information in order to visualize and exchange it. The result enables emergency response teams to easily collect, integrate, analyze and share information in real time with others that have a need to know.

On one level, this decoupling action is enabled by a patent-pending integration platform called Extensible Information Systems (XIS™) that uses XML and advanced software agents. To give the network underneath the decoupled memory and performance features needed to easily manage collaboration with continuously changing data streams, Polexis researchers use the patented Ring Buffered Network Bus (RBNB) technology, by Creare, Inc. of Hanover, NH. RBNB is a product of an SBIR investment through NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, while the origin of XIS is attributable to DARPA investment.

"It is a great pleasure to see something we developed be so effectively transitioned and used for public benefit," said Larry Freudinger, co-inventor of the RBNB and lead for advanced engineering environments at NASA Dryden. VIGILYS is an example of the inherent value of federal technology investment strategies, according to Kimberly Holly, vice president of operations and strategy for Polexis. "It’s quite an exciting accomplishment to take technologies, independently developed through the SBIR process and DARPA, and create a solution that can offer great value to government and commercial enterprises worldwide." Q

For more information, contact Larry Freudinger at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, 661/276-3542, l.freudinger@dfrc.nasa.gov. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

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