Pursuant to guidance contained in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) memorandum of December 16, 2005, Improving Public Access to and Dissemination of Government Information and Using the Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model , the MMS strives to organize and categorize our information intended for public access, make it searchable across other federal agencies, and use formal information models, such as OMB’s Data Reference Model (DRM), to assist in information dissemination activities. Starting in late 2006, the MMS will also review the performance and results of our information dissemination activities on an annual basis and will describe the results of this review in an IT Strategic Plan Performance Results Plan accompanying the next iteration of our IT Strategic Plan due for publication in early 2007. The current MMS Information Technology Strategic Plan and Information Guide, 2005-2007 is available for review.

The OMB DRM (along with enhancements made by the Department of the Interior) describes and categorizes, at an aggregate level, the data and information supporting the MMS major program and business line operations - Offshore Minerals Management and Minerals Revenue Management. The DRM will enable MMS to describe the types of interaction and exchanges occurring between the Federal government and you, our customers and stakeholders.

The DRM also establishes a classification for Federal data and identifies duplicative data resources. The MMS’ use of a common data model will streamline information exchange processes within the Federal government and between government and external stakeholders.

The DRM has three standardization areas supported by associated information models that will be detailed in our future version of the MMS Information Technology Strategic Plan:
 

	Data Description - provides a means to uniformly describe data, thereby supporting its discovery and sharing
	Data Context - facilitates discovery of data through an approach to the categorization of data according to categories
	Data Sharing - supports the access and exchange of data where access consists of ad-hoc requests and exchange consists of fixed, re-occurring transactions between parties