Universal Core (UCORE)

UCORE is a federal information sharing initiative that supports the NSIS and associated agency strategies. UCORE enables information sharing by defining an implementable specification (XML Schema) containing agreed-upon representations for the most commonly shared and universally understood concepts of who, what, when, and where in the context of national security. 

Begun initially as a DoD-DNI partnership effort in 2007, the release of UCORE 2.0 in 2008 represented a collaboration of four major agencies—DoD, DNI, DOJ, and DHS. UCORE improves information exchange by providing standard XML-based definitions for the critical, universally understood concepts described above and implementing them across a broad government stakeholder base, regardless of the IT system being used. It also provides a mechanism to mark information with security classification markings through a standard used within the intelligence community, known as the Information Security Markings (ISM) standard.