NIEM and UCORE - A Real World Example of Cross Domain Information Sharing

In 2008, the Seahawk project in Charleston, South Carolina, operating under the umbrella of the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) initiative, generated a Vessel Activity Report (VAR) for each vessel inbound to the Port of Charleston. Using the Maritime Information Exchange Model (MIEM)—which would soon become NIEM-Maritime—the Department of Transportation, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and 30 other participating federal, state, and local agencies could all exchange information about cargos, crews, and vessels. The Seahawk platform generated a VAR for each vessel, adding value with a risk assessment, vessel analyses, and related data. 

The Seahawk pilot demonstrated that UCORE could take the who/what/when/where data in each MIEM-conformant VAR, digest it, and make it understandable to any UCORE-conformant information exchange beyond the maritime community—even if that user group was not itself MIEM-conformant. When the MDA community converted from MIEM to NIEM, in order to conform to DHS enterprise standards, the MDA community brought its UCORE-compatibility with it to the NIEM world, demonstrating the power of standards to bridge network boundaries. 

Today, the MDA initiative is one of the most significant cross-domain information-sharing enterprises in the Federal Government, linking industry, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Transportation around the world. It comprises a striking example of success, built on a foundation of UCORE and NIEM. 

Read the success story: UCORE and NIEM: Creating Potent New Cross-Boundary Networks