Data Repository & Issuing Office (DRIO)

Developed by GRC for UK MoD Directorate of Sea Systems.

The UK MoD manage and control a great variety of digital information in many areas of their work. This process has been, in the past, manual and localised and has often resulted in uncertainty on the location and state of these data sets. GRC proposed to develop a configuration control system which would centralise the process of managing digital information and allow for a far greater amount of historic information to be preserved to control all the modifications to any data set. In 2006, GRC was awarded the contract to develop, host and support the system for 5 years.

The system allows owners of data sets to register and lodge these data sets in the system ready for issuing to interested parties. These data sets are delivered to GRC in softcopy on CD/DVD and are uploaded on the GRC fileservers and on the central database. Customers of the system can view lodged data sets, but not their contents, through an easy to use website interface and can request delivery of a data set via the website. The MoD owner of the data set is then automatically emailed with all the details of the “order” and is requested to confirm authority for the delivery. Once this is received GRC can produce a copy of the requested data set at the push of a button which is then mailed to the customer.

The system also allows lodging of any updates to the data sets back in the system. The new version of the data set would be uploaded in the system, with details of what changes were made. Both customers and owners can then view the history of any data set, what changes have been made to it, by whom, when and for what reason. As GRC will continue holding all previous versions of modified data sets, the audit trail is completely preserved.

Due to the ownership issues of the data, strict safeguards are in place to prevent data sets being requested or uploaded by unauthorised users of the system.