Technologies for repository interoperation and access control

Over the past several years, network-accessible repositories have been developed by various academic, government, and industrial organizations to provide access to software and related resources. Allowing distributed maintenance of these repositories while enabling users to access resources from multiple repositories via a single interface has brought about the need for interoperation. Concerns about intellectual property rights and export regulations have brought about the need for access control. This paper describes technologies for interoperation and access control that have been developed as part of the National High-performance Software Exchange (NHSE) project, as well as their deployment in a freely available repository maintainer's toolkit called Repository in a Box. The approach to interoperation has been to participate in the development of and to implement an IEEE standard data model for software catalog records. The approach to access control has been to extend the data model in the area of intellectual property rights and to implement access control mechanisms of varying strengths, ranging from email address verification to X.509 certificates, that enforce software distribution policies specified via the data model. Although they have been developed within the context of software repositories, these technologies should be applicable to distributed digital libraries in general.