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GCN Home > 06/18/07 issue

Information exchange model at the next level

Crisis-information schema simplifies core elements

By Joab Jackson

The National Information Exchange Model has gotten its first upgrade. Version 2 should be released by the end of this month, and the final beta is available on the NIEM site.

“There are literally thousands of changes. It’s a major extension,” said Paul Wormeli, executive director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a Justice Department-funded nonprofit that supports the NIEM program management office. “We’ve gone through a beta stage where we got a lot of good comments from people, and we’re feeling now that this is [a] pretty solid release.”

The large Extensible Markup Language schema, overseen by the Homeland Security and Justice departments, provides a common language for federal, state and local agencies to share information on natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other crises.

Each piece of agency data is tagged by a particular NIEM name so it can easily be identified by systems outside the one where it originated.

The first production version of NIEM appeared in June 2006. It used Justice’s Global Justice XML Data Model as the foundation, but is being expanded to cover other common items relating to criminal justice and law enforcement.

Perhaps the major area of change is the unification of namespaces, a term applied to collections of tags.

The first version of NIEM had two main namespaces, Universal and Common.

Universal components were items that would be common to all parties using NIEM. Common components were items that existed in more than one domain.

In this context, a domain is a specific area of interest. NIEM has seven: emergency management, immigration, infrastructure protection, intelligence, international trade, justice and the screening of individuals. It incorporates nearly 4,000 distinct terms.

Having two universal namespaces, however, proved to be problematic for developers of systems that would use NIEM to share its information with third parties. Both namespaces contained terms that were very similar, such as those that described characteristics of people. As a result, developers wouldn’t know which terms to use.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Data Management, Homeland Security, State & Local



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