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GCN Home > 03/01/05 web stories

DHS, Justice start federal data model

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

The Homeland Security and Justice departments have begun work on a shared Extensible Markup Language data model, one that they hope other agencies will adopt.

The Collaboration on Objects for Reuse and Exchange (CORE) will develop a general data model to let federal, state, local and tribal programs share criminal justice information.

Justice CIO Vance Hitch added it would be possible to expand the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) to include all federal activities.

Hitch, along with Homeland Security CIO Steve Cooper, announced the new initiative yesterday at the kickoff of the Global Justice XML Data Model Developer’s Workshop in Arlington, Va.

NIEM will use the Global JXDM as the base for a wider vocabulary, the two CIOs said. Justice’s Infrastructure and Standards Working Group created JXDM to improve data sharing between state law enforcement agencies and the department.

The partnership will let Homeland Security reuse components of Global JXDM model for some of its own XML data modeling, Cooper said.

DHS adopted the model because it saw no benefit in recreating “what had already been done by the Department of Justice. That makes zero sense,” Cooper said.

Speakers at the workshop said it makes sense for other agencies to use the data model for XML projects rather than create new models from scratch.

Use of a shared model will facilitate sharing of data among agencies because the vocabulary would be the same, said Michael Daconta, metadata program manager at Homeland Security.

Daconta and Jeremy Warren, Justice’s enterprise architecture specialist, oversaw the creation of CORE.

Development on the Global JXDM model itself will continue as well, Warren said.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Homeland Security, Web Strategies



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