NIEM continues to look for avenues to create strong partnerships with industry.
NIEM has held industry events and town halls, and includes industry in forums related to the evolution of both tools and training. In addition, NIEM works with numerous industry groups.
From its earliest days, NIEM has included tools that make it easier for users to work with the model. In June 2011, government and standards consortia teamed up to develop a call to action for industry to play a greater role in developing standards that support initiatives such as NIEM.
NIEM-UML
At their June 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City, the Object Management Group (OMG) Technical Committee—an organization dedicated to technical standards—officially approved a Request for Proposal (RFP) to develop a Unified Modeling Language (UML) Profile for NIEM.
For technical folks, the UML profile will minimize complexity and enable a better understanding of what it means to be NIEM conformant. The UML profile will be an industry standard that enables the development of NIEM information exchanges across systems, agencies, and levels of government. From a business perspective, the UML profile will enable a visual understanding of NIEM, which will help to better align an organization’s information exchange needs with its business requirements.
On May 21, 2012 the (Final) Revised Submission to the UML Profile for NIEM (otherwise known as NIEM-UML) was delivered to OMG. NIEM-UML aims to provide a standard for modeling NIEM artifacts (such as Model Package Descriptions, or MPDs) leveraging UML. Monday, June 18, 2012, the OMG Architecture Board voted to recommend the NIEM-UML profile for approval by the OMG Board of Directors (BoD).
The submission and subsequent vote marks a significant milestone in the approval process of the NIEM-UML Profile as an OMG standard. We are just one step away from formal approval by the OMG BoD. The OMG BoD is expected to validate the business aspects of the NIEM-UML submission, such as commercial viability, over the next few months.
The development team for this effort consisted of members from the NIEM Program Management Office (PMO), the OMG Technical Committee, Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE), and industry and academic partners. Go team!
The NIEM PMO anticipates NIEM-UML will enable greater adoption of NIEM by tool vendors, whose tools will simplify the development and implementation of NIEM-based information exchange functionalities. It is expected that these tools will be available from both open source and commercial vendors. The ultimate goal is for the government to be able to purchase commercial products with standardized information exchange "baked-in" from the start.
Thank you to those in the community who have volunteered to help the NIEM PMO pilot NIEM-UML!
The NIEM-UML Beta Specification has been published to the Object Management Group’s website. Visit http://www.omg.org/spec/NIEM_UML/ to learn more.
Collaboration with industry has been and continues to be a hallmark of NIEM.
In addition, you can always contact us!