Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 03/07/05 issue

DHS, Justice launch federal data model

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Criminal justice XML implementation could be basis for a government schema

The Homeland Security and Justice departments have unveiled plans to work jointly on a common computer language that could become a model for agencies to use to share information.

Dubbed the National Information Exchange Model, this Extensible Markup Language framework will use Justice’s Global Justice XML Data Model as its base.

Justice CIO Vance Hitch and Homeland Security CIO Steve Cooper announced the new joint initiative, the Collaboration on Objects for Reuse and Exchange (CORE), last week at the Global Justice XML Data Model Developer’s Workshop in Arlington, Va.

The initiative is unrelated to CORE.gov, the Component Organization and Registration Environment, an online repository of business and technical components started by the Federal Enterprise Architecture Project Management Office.

The joint DHS-Justice effort could form the basis for a federal XML dictionary. Hitch said all federal agencies could use NIEM as a basis for their XML efforts. Yet he and others at the workshop acknowledged that participation from a larger number of agencies would be needed to prompt such adoption.

The idea is to “take the core data elements of JXDM that are neutral and use them in other disciplines,” said Paul Wormeli, executive director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a Justice-funded nonprofit that assists law enforcement agencies in implementing the JXDM. “Now that all this work is done, why redo it?”

Others in the federal XML community see NIEM, at least the tentative first steps of the project, as moving government in the right direction on data interoperability.

Owen Ambur, co-chairman of the Federal XML Community of Practice, said establishing a base model for XML use could cut development time of other agencies’ own XML projects.

“In order to share information, we have to share the data elements efficiently,” Ambur said. “The hard part of that is always agreeing on the terms and definitions, and the beauty of [JXDM] is that it has already been done.”

To the rescue

Using JXDM for a wider base makes good sense because it is a mature effort, said Jeremy Warren, Justice’s enterprise architecture specialist. Warren, along with Michael Daconta, metadata program manager at Homeland Security, oversaw CORE’s creation.

More news on related topics: E-Government, Enterprise Architecture, Homeland Security, IT Management



GCN Popup