A group of 20 states joined forces to overcome the challenges of exchanging information so that they could share data across state and city government boundaries.
This grassroots effort, called the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, set into motion the creation of a seamless, interoperable model for data exchange that could solve a range of information sharing challenges across a variety of government agencies. After a two-year effort, the first prerelease of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) was released in April 2003.
Built upon GJXDM success and lessons learned from using it, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) was launched in February 2005 to bring together key stakeholders from federal, state, local, and tribal governments to develop and deploy a national model for information sharing and the organizational structure to govern it. Since 2005, NIEM has issued three releases: 1.0 in 2006, 2.0 in 2007, and 2.1 in 2009.
With multiple real-world successes—such as the rapid implementation of the national sex offender registry, as well as the Customs and Immigration Services' implementation of e-Verify—NIEM is currently used among 14 domains and is poised to expand its areas of standardization into health, human services, agriculture, and more.
National Adoption
Previous successes have demonstrated the power of cross-boundary information exchange within the justice and law enforcement communities using NIEM. In 2007, state, local, federal officials and private sector partners came together to explore how to apply a common semantic lexicon and lessons learned to standardize suspicious activity reporting across the nation. The Information Sharing Environment Suspicious Activity Report (ISE-SAR) Functional Standard Development Team defined the elements that became the SAR Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD). The ISE-SAR IEPD defined the terms that would comprise a Suspicious Activity Report anywhere a SAR is used or generated by participating partners at the federal, state, local, and private levels.
NIEM served as the mechanism in providing element reuse and extension, where necessary, to achieve mission-specific cross-boundary information exchange. Beyond providing element reuse, NIEM also provided a framework for discovery and agreement of key policies and business processes across agencies and departments. The NIEM process facilitated a dialogue with privacy and civil liberties advocates-moving the debate from general discussions about the dangers of collecting SAR data to identifying specific data elements that should be afforded certain privacy protections. Reuse has been achieved, beyond what was initially envisioned, through implementation of the ISE-SAR IEPD in Canada as well as Sweden to improve information sharing and exchange within their public safety operations.
The value of NIEM is not found only in the law enforcement and homeland security communities. There is broad applicability when it comes to cross-boundary information sharing and exchange. A recent example includes the use of NIEM in the creation of schemas to support the data collection required for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The Recipient Report Submission Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) supported the reporting requirement from recipients5 of federal funds to the FederalReporting.gov portal. This portal works with the Recovery.gov website to provide a comprehensive solution for ARRA recipient reporting and data transparency.
However, without a clear definition of a common exchange process or a predefined structure for reporting the data, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) would be faced with significant challenges in efficiently identifying fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement of recovery resources. The Recipient Report Submission IEPD enables common reporting – both from a process and data perspective – based on requirements established in Section 1512 of the Recovery Act. This initiative crossed numerous boundaries enabling the federal government to establish a standardized exchange for the submission of recipient reports from each state and from all participating prime and sub recipients.
The creation of cross-boundary information exchanges allow agencies to quickly enable information sharing and exchange, at a higher quality through use of an established process and model, and at a lower cost through the reuse capabilities supported by a common model. Integrated into the NIEM framework are ready-to-use methodologies, tools, training, data models and an active practitioner community.