The Disclosure and Release Tool (DART) was developed under a subcontract to NJV C for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). DART is a web-based decision capture tool that facilitates NGA’s task of determining the disclosure and release disposition for their products. The system not only records the release authority, but also provides the thought process or reasons why the decision was made. The system utilizes role based access control to limit who can change specific information within the system.
This real-time interface to disclosure and release decisions will provide the Office of International Policy releasability guidance to the Integrated Library Service inventory, and will serve as a critical component in allowing limited dissemination data to be hosted on an extranet. It will also provide much needed enhancement to the management/control function for all geospacial products to include imagery, intelligence, licensing and copyright obligations.
The system is an N-tier architecture utilizing commertial-off-the-shelf software. Oracle is used as the database, with Coldfusion as the application logic. GIS services are provided by ESRI’s ArcIMS and ArcSDE products. By splitting the work among these different servers, DART is able to scale as the size of the data or user base grows.