The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD): Strategic Priorities and Key Research Issues

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Supplement to the President's Budget

Each year, the Executive Office of the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report on the NITRD Program that serves as a supplement to the President's Budget for that fiscal year. The annual Supplement provides a technical summary of the budget request for the NITRD Program and describes research and development activities in advanced networking, software, high-end computing, and computational science, cybersecurity, and other leading-edge information technologies funded by the Federal agencies that currently participate in the NITRD Program.

Strategic priorities focus on next-generation methods, technologies, and tools that integrate and efficiently manage massive stores of distributed, heterogeneous information while integrating the human in the discovery process - for example, science and engineering data, Federal records, health information, scientific and other types of archival literature.

Key NITRD Research Issues include:

• Information standards:
  • Data interoperability,
  • integration of distributed data;
  • generalizable ontologies;
  • data format description language for electronic records and data;
  • data structure research for complex digital objects;
  • interoperability standards for semantically understood ubiquitous health information exchanges; and
  • information services for cloud-based systems
• Information management:
  • Intelligent rule-based data management;
  • Increasing access to and cost-effective integration, maintenance of complex collections of heterogeneous data;
  • Innovative architectures for data-intensive and power-aware computing;
  • Scalable technologies;
  • authentication) with data;
  • Integrated data repositories, computing grids;
  • Testbeds;
  • Sustainability, validation of complex models; and
  • Grid-enabled visualization for petascale collections
• Information infrastructure:
  • Technical challenges in the management of the Federal government's electronic records;
  • Technologies (data transfer, mass storage) and tools for long-term preservation, curation, federation, sustainability, accessibility, and survivability of vital electronic records, data collections, and health records; and
  • Multidisciplinary R&D in ways to convert data into knowledge and discovery; social-computational systems