BlueSpace

Collaborative searching across security domains

The BlueSpace Discover application provides the end user a single interface for searching data held at multiple security levels and displays the search results on one screen. In addition, users can share sets of results with those who have access to the system through MLS collaborative folders and an MLS community tag cloud.

Internet search vendors have provided ‘single search’ services for users to find content on the internet, and increasingly federated search vendors have been employed by corporations to provide ‘single search’ across the many different data repositories and indexes they maintain. However, the defense and intelligence communities have unique challenges due to their data repositories being distributed across separate security levels and networks, and so require a search sytem that can span multiple security domains.

BlueSpace takes a unique approach to ‘single search’, leveraging a multi-level architecture as opposed to cross-domain transfer. In a cross-domain multi-level interface, just as in a cross-domain transfer ‘browse down’ search interface, users view aggregated search result lists across different security domains. In cross-domain transfer, when a user clicks a link from a search results page to open it, the system elevates the corresponding content object (e.g. HTML page) to the same level as the search results page. By contrast, in BlueSpace Discover, the system opens content objects at their original security level, without the need to elevate them to a higher level. By maintaining information at the correct security level, the need to push massive amounts of data up through guards is removed.

Some high level features include:

• Viewing search results from data sources maintained at multiple security levels on one screen
• Searching from a single entry box for web pages, metadata, etc. with all results aggregated
• Specifying the security levels from which to search
• Marking results as relevant with a single click and sharing those results with others in the community
• Assigning metadata (tags) to single results or sets of results
• Viewing search history and sorting by date or search criteria
• Commenting on a search result and sharing the comment with colleagues
• Viewing tag clouds for each security level and thus discovering what others are searching for most often

Discover relies on the BlueSpace Client Framework and Connect application on the end user desktop to manage application windows and action requests at the different security levels. A Discover Application Appliance must be hosted in the cloud, connected to each of the networks in which mail stores reside. The Discover Application Appliance itself contains instances of BlueSpace’s Trusted Service Bus, Mashup Server and the Discover Application Server.