Defense Technical Information Center
Abstract
DTIC’s modernization goal is to ensure users are provided access through state of the art and emerging technology tools to the most relevant information, drawn from multiple sources, and in one session are provided full situational awareness given their role or interest. DTIC is DoD’s single central source and is an essential knowledge resource improving user results increases DTIC’s return on investment (ROI) and S&T’s ROI. DTIC is an enabler to DoD Science and Technology (S&T) delivery of innovation to the warfighter. By capturing the results of today’s research and making it available to all DoD users, DTIC provides the building blocks for the next generation of advancement to allow researcher to start where past efforts left off. DTIC maximizes the availability and use of technical information and products resulting from Defense-funded technical activities while safeguarding national security, export control, and intellectual property rights, balancing sharing with protection. DTIC’s search and collaboration applications foster innovation, competition, and identification of solutions in controlled unclassified and classified environments. Public Access/Open Science initiatives support knowledge sharing with the public. DTIC captures the results of S&T efforts, preserves, curates, and the shares that information. Digital transformation and modernization efforts move DTIC from a provider of documents to a knowledge resource, fusing data and providing visualization to increase understanding and show trends. Collaboration tools encourage cross component coordination, and the Information Analysis Centers (IACs) provide industry subject matter experts (SMEs) to answer quick turn questions with the ability to facilitate further research through short term task orders to complex multi-year research and prototyping efforts. DTIC collects the results of DoD sponsored research from 70+ labs, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), DTIC’s Information Analysis Centers (IACs), grants and other contracts. With over 700 customers, many in Programs Executive Offices (PEOs), the IACs provide support for fundamental, foundational research and technology insertion beyond milestone C. DTIC is responsible for developing, coordinating, and enabling the scientific and technical information (STINFO) program for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) and the DOD scientific and technical (S&T) enterprise. In this role, DTIC drafts and manages policy for scientific and technical information (STI) exchanges for the research and engineering (R&E) community. Utilizing the United States Air Force (USAF) Cloud One environment and working with both the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the R&E Joint Reserve Directorate (JRD), DTIC is utilizing AI and ML technologies, with development, security, and operations (DevSecOps, or rapid security focused development) capability to provide users state of the art innovative discovery and submission tools. The focus for FY 2025 is continued enhancement of discovery and analysis across all DTIC-operated networks – public (Impact Level (IL) 2), controlled unclassified information (CUI) (IL 4) and classified (IL 6) – while adding consolidation and delivery of a modern submission pipeline based on ecommerce best practices to simplify and reduce effort for submitters, provide them tracking and visibility, and improve the quality and completeness of submissions. In concert with congressional and R&E community interest, DTIC modernization efforts are informed by the DoD community to transform distribution, enhance collection, strengthen analytical capabilities on S&T content, and support the management of research data sets. Ongoing modernization activities embrace data-driven concepts and leverage commercial innovations and opens the opportunity to draw new insights, recognize relationships, and track activity. DTIC is using on-demand compute resources and DevSecOps to deliver a stream of products and user-sought insights and, in the process, reduce the timelines and investments in user interfaces and data fields. Rather than each search returning in seconds, DTIC is executing multiple concurrent searches in response to user queries to provide a complete portfolio of S&T activity, allowing users to select the most relevant information for their needs. DTIC will note choices and tailor future results for those users. DTIC holds a knowledge base of nearly 5 million information records and is working with the R&E and S&T communities to increase its repository, enhance completeness of those records already in the collection, assure quality of records submitted, and federate to additional information stores and resources. To meet Open Science objectives, DTIC is expanding its inventory of peer-reviewed journal articles funded by the DoD, linking to additional sources, and providing access to all users without embargo, to include links to digital data sets. DTIC is engaged with the Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) to seek methods to improve data quality, focusing on opportunities made possible through enterprise data management and other advances in technology, to include but not limited to AI and ML. The Program 001 provides for DTIC mission operations, which are focused on two core activities: Content and Discovery: Content: Includes the S&T repository DoD and Service records (reports and research data). DTIC acquires and prepares 80 thousand records a year, aligned to critical technology areas, DoD Communities of Interest (CoIs), and technology areas to aid discovery. a. DTIC will work with our partners to identify service offerings and complete a market survey to identify the current combination of technologies. Ongoing efforts focus on consolidating input systems and migrating users to new submission interfaces to improve quality of material and realign resources from manual processing to end user tools. b. A state-of-the-art electronic document submission pipeline is being implemented, reducing the effort needed to process the thousands of paper and other media to drop off points. c. DTIC will continue efforts to improve the quality of existing and new materials and completeness of collections. d. Some documents require manual processing, must be digitized, scanned for Personally Identifiable Information (PII), verify control markings, and extract the metadata used to aid discovery. Further, DTIC continues to work to complete digitization of hundreds of thousands of documents on microfilm. DTIC continues leading open science activities, sharing content with Advana, and conducting gap analysis to identify sources for potential materials, and federating to external collections. Discovery: Offers search and insight on cloud Impact Level (IL)4/NIPRNet (Controlled Unclassified Information, or CUI), and IL6/SIPRNet (classified), providing for situational awareness of on-going research activity across the Department. By consolidating tools consistency improves, time users spend locating data well be reduced, lessening the need to be trained in collection types and content, reduce maintenance requirements allowing focus on users and features. Data scientist and analyst will continue to develop models using AI and ML to increase community understanding of the S&T landscape; incorporate commercial analytic and search technologies to improve search results; and provide users key information and a complete picture of activity and progress. By employing tools now and in the cloud, adding natural language query, and user self-service functions, DTIC looks to move the burden and of initial analysis from the user by pre-processing and presenting information products that inform and answer questions using data drawn from multiple collections. DTIC will refocus resources on information analysis and interrogation capabilities. DTIC MODERNIZATION DTIC continues to work to ensure our users are provided access to the most relevant information, drawn from multiple sources, quickly and in one session. Users are provided with data, trends, and analysis to provide full situational awareness given their role or interest. DTIC is DoD’s single central source and is an essential knowledge resource improving user results--increasing both DTIC’s return on investment (ROI) and S&T’s ROI. Modernization focus areas include the following: - Readiness and Availability: The goal is to be always on and available. Using rapid failover capabilities of gov cloud, Operating System level zero-day responses from Cloud One, along with rapid deployment capabilities of DevSecOps, DTIC will increase readiness and availability, including access to on-demand compute and storage for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) implementation. Downtime will be reduced and access to burst compute capacity will address user needs. - Submissions: Having consolidated submission processes in FY 2024, new tools break from past practice that tied submissions to a different interface for each collection. The consolidated process builds an integrated single pipeline with a consistent clear user interface. It is built on ecommerce capabilities, with automated steps validating metadata, tracking information to the submitter, and persistent identifiers to integrate Service feeder systems more fully with the DTIC submission system. Submitters have access to batch upload, web-based application interfaces, and system-to-system submissions. Enhancing and simplifying the submission system, along with the automation of the process, will remove barriers and result in a more complete picture (quality and quantity) of the state of knowledge and activity accessed by DTIC search, providing improved situational awareness, increased understanding, and enabling better decisions. - Search and Analysis: Adopting AI/ML-ready commercial search engine gives DTIC users access to a leading commercial engine and user interface features that will be continuously enhanced. Analysis and visualizations will be a key method of conveying information. Return-on-investment (ROI) for S&T will increase as users will spend less time looking for information and more time benefiting from information at DTIC (less rework, optimized efforts, enhanced analysis, and building community), improving coordination of research efforts. Analysis and data mining of DoD collections will uncover new relationships, trends, and opportunities. This foundation will be extended in FY 2025 with new models, further data enhancement, and integration of emerging technology insertion, including addition of validated AI/ML and large language models (LLM) informed products. - Data Sets: Aided by cooperative engagement with the services and coordination within R&E, data sets continue to mature as a knowledge asset. DTIC is coordinating its approach with the CDAO and is working with the DoD S&T community to populate a research data sets directory. DTIC chairs the Research Data Executive Council (RDEC) and is an active member of the Research Data Working Group (RDWG); the Services are engaged in governance and strategy for metadata sharing, application programming interfaces (APIs), and code/tools to use. Increased awareness of existing DoD S&T data sets across the community, revalidating results, and sharing data sets and associated code/tools across Services/agencies, will provide a baseline to validate the utility of data set preservation. OTHER MISSION PRIORITIES Other priority and complementary DTIC mission activities are described below: - Bring communities together supporting collaboration between researchers, warfighters, industry, academia, Federal agencies, and allies. - Information protection: readily available to trusted users and blocked from unauthorized access. - Develop and manage DoD’s Science Technology Information Policy (STIP). - Maintain compliance with existing public law, regulations, and guidelines. In support of these mission operations, DTIC leases space and critical shared services (e.g., human resources (HR); financial management and accounting; contracting; cloud hosting; common-use IT services and security; communications; and civilian payroll services) from expert and efficient DoD and commercial service-providers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Project
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2025
- Source ID
- 001_0605801KA_6_0400_PB_2025
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