DARPA Open Catalog

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Open Catalog contains a curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications. DARPA funds fundamental and applied research in a variety of areas including data science, cyber, anomaly detection, etc., which may result in reusable technology that can benefit multiple government domains. The goal of the Open Catalog is to make these reusable technologies available to other branches of government and the general public, when possible, to promote efficiency and effectiveness in developing national capabilities. The DARPA Open Catalog organizes publically releasable material from DARPA programs. DARPA has an open strategy to help increase the impact of government investments.

DARPA is also interested in building communities around government-funded software and research. The creation of the Open Catalog will help enable the development of these communities by directing interested web traffic to the code repositories for this software. This will enhance the ability of nontraditional partners to leverage these software tools, by increasing the exposure to the software and thereby increasing the potential for a community to develop around any particular piece of code. DARPA and the larger government will benefit from the development of these communities, who will hopefully test and evaluate elements of the software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.

More broadly, a goal is to establish a modern technology base-- including better starting positions for new/small labs/companies, collaborative projects, cross-community applications, transparent performance evaluation, and interoperability. The Open Catalog initially went live in early February 2014 with software and publications that were developed under the XDATA program. Since then, the Catalog has expanded to contain all of the programs with releasable content under the Information Innovations Office (I2O), which in addition to open source software included software for government purposes only, complied software (binaries), experimental results, data, and various kinds of publications. If the Research and Development community shows sufficient interest, DARPA will continue to make available information generated by DARPA programs, including software, publications, data, and experimental results.