DARPA Opens Software and Data

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DARPA, the people who helped to bring you the internet are now making their software and data available to the public. The DARPA Open Catalog, will contain software, publications, data and experimental details. DARPA says it is opting to make the catalog available to help further the efforts of the R&D community.

Many DoD and government research efforts and software procurements contain publicly releasable elements, including open source software. DARPA has an open source strategy for areas of work including big data to help increase the impact of government investments in building a flexible technology base.

The initial offerings in the DARPA Open Catalog include software toolkits and peer-reviewed publications from the XDATA program in the agency’s Information Innovation Office (I2O). The partially funded toolkits are designed to encourage flexible development of software that may enable users of targeted defense applications to process large volumes of data in a timely manner to meet their mission requirements.

The Catalog contains a variety of work generated by organizations partially funded by DARPA. Each catalog listing includes information about the source of the project and its source code. Work focuses on areas ranging from analytics, to big data, data visualizations and infrastructure. Big data has been a focus for DARPA which recently made awards to organizations building big data tools.

“Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”