JCIT Data Standards

JCIT is working to assimilate a variety of current projects into a single master plan to develop and adopt data standards for the justice system in Texas. There is a national movement toward the exchange of justice data using agreed-upon standards, sometimes referred to as "integrated justice." In the public safety/criminal justice/ homeland security arena, this movement coalesced around the work of the volunteer members of a Department of Justice sponsored group called Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) Advisory Committee ("GAC"), a "group of groups" representing independent organizations across the (primarily criminal) justice spectrum. The Global Justice XML Data Model ("GJXDM") has been the centerpiece of this effort, and more recently the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) has emerged.

This effort has been taken up in the state court arena at the national level, through the efforts of several groups: the Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA), the National Association for Court Management (NACM), and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), in concert with the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ). They are providing the governance, policy, and technical standards adoption processes by which the state courts can fulfill their role as full partners in justice information exchanges.

The Texas Path to NIEM project has been coordinated through the Texas Integrated Justice Information Systems (TIJIS) Steering Committee, a statewide advisory group structured to assist in the coordination of statewide IJIS programs for information sharing. In collaboration with TIJIS, the Department of Public Safety, and the Department of Criminal Justice, the JCIT and the Texas Judicial Council adopted the following statement of policy in the Texas Administrative Code: