As a nation, we are a long way from being able to consistently share information across organizational lines and disciplines. We lack a national mechanism to identify and facilitate information exchanges with other agencies and jurisdictions. Consequently agencies can’t effectively share information in a timely, secure manner. And too often, there are fundamental differences in the nature and understanding of information between them.
The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is an effort to solve one part of the problem -- having a common vocabulary and data structure that will foster information sharing and support true interoperability of information systems. The goal of the NIEM Program Management Office is to build NIEM in such a way that agencies and organizations choose to use these standards for minimizing the effort and maximizing the efficiency in implementing automated information exchanges.
NIEM is a common language used to automate information exchanges between and among agencies and communities that are engaged in critical missions: counterterrorism, emergency and disaster management, law enforcement, maritime awareness, public safety and the administration of justice. NIEM provides the standard vocabulary and data structure to facilitate the computerization of information exchanges, which makes it possible to create such exchanges faster, with less risk and at a lower cost than other alternatives. NIEM is used across the country at the local, state and federal levels.
In an effort to support automated information exchanges across agencies and disciplines, stakeholders are viewed as members of various communities of interest, which are represented in NIEM by domains. The participating domains are:
• chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear;
• family services;
• immigration;
• infrastructure protection;
• intelligence;
• international trade;
• justice;
• maritime awareness; and
• screening (people).
A key principle of NIEM is that the model’s common vocabulary is governed based on use: information of use to all domains (universal data); information that may be useful across multiple, but not all domains (data that’s common to multiple domains); and domain-specific data. Dividing the totality of data elements into these three categories makes it easier to reach consensus on those data elements that are of interest to more than a single domain, and ensures that NIEM remains agile for the communities that use it.
Another key principle is that the communities of interest that steward a domain represented in NIEM are national in scope -- involving individuals and local, state, tribal and federal agencies.
Since effective information sharing is critical to the success of a coordinated emergency response and its data communications, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Interoperability and Compatibility and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) agreed to jointly steward the emergency management domain within the NIEM data model.
NIEM and the Emergency Data Exchange Language
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Interoperability and Compatibility, housed within the Science and Technology Directorate, facilitates a practitioner-driven messaging standards initiative called the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL).
The EDXL initiative is a public-private partnership established to create an information sharing capability between disparate emergency response software applications, systems and devices. The goal of EDXL standards is to facilitate emergency information sharing and data exchange across local, state, tribal, national and nongovernmental emergency response and management services disciplines.
The XML-based EDXL suite, working together with FEMA and NIEM, develops standards to assist the emergency response community in sharing data seamlessly and securely while responding to an incident. A vendor testing and certification program for EDXL has been developed and implemented in partnership with the National Incident Management System Support Center.
The EDXL standards are created and maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a nonprofit consortium that promotes open standards. The Science and Technology Directorate and FEMA are domain stewards of the NIEM emergency management domain.
EDXL doesn’t replace NIEM, but it does complement an agency’s mission of information sharing across jurisdictions. For example, the EDXL Common Alerting Protocol 1.0 that’s used by many agencies, including international partners, can be combined with the NIEM vocabulary to provide multiple layers of interoperability. EDXL and NIEM are a powerful combination for sharing across the mission areas that are represented in NIEM.
NIEM as a Methodology
NIEM is more than a data model. A critical part of NIEM is the definition of exchanges that are disciplined to the model. This makes it clear what the exchange is and defines it in enough detail for technologists to implement the exchange in automated systems. The methodology for doing this is applied to create an Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD). NIEM has carefully defined the requirements for preparing an IEPD and has published a tool to help agencies create them. There’s also a clearinghouse of reference IEPDs, developed so that these specifications can be reused and extended where appropriate.
The IEPD life cycle begins with a strong emphasis on the business need for the exchange, as expressed in a scenario describing the requirement and conditions for initiating the exchange. Following a detailed requirements analysis, during which the specific data required for a useful exchange are identified, the data elements are then mapped to the NIEM and extended as necessary. The culmination of the process leads to the generation of an XML schema representing the exchange, and the creation of constraint and extension schema as necessary to perform the exchange.
The business need, rules, mapping and XML schema -- along with other such material -- are documented in the IEPD and posted to the IEPD clearinghouse, which encourages reuse by others who are seeking to implement the same or similar exchanges.
The Value of Open Standards
The basic value of using open standards, such as XML, and associated Web services as a means of implementing information exchanges has been well established in the commercial world. This approach significantly reduces the time and cost of implementing exchanges. Agencies that have adopted NIEM have reported savings of as much as 75 percent of the total project costs. Furthermore, the use of a standard that’s technology neutral offers agencies a stronger protection from obsolescence in implementation.
The Future of NIEM
As NIEM adoption continues to increase, the program will evaluate the growth of additional domains to serve other communities of interest, such as transportation and health. For example, the New York City Health and Human Services agency has adopted NIEM for the basis of its information exchanges and is seeking to add data components in NIEM for these purposes. Several state CIOs see NIEM as an important standard in statewide information sharing among the relevant disciplines and have expressed interest in applying NIEM in a variety of domains.
Finally it’s likely that as semantic technology matures, NIEM will evaluate technology beyond XML, such as ontology-based structures. NIEM will take advantage of new standards as they emerge and become widely adopted. NIEM’s design, from its inception, has anticipated the future of semantic technology and will make this transition when the user community is ready.
NIEM is rapidly gaining acceptance at local, state and federal levels, and it offers the promise of fulfilling the need for a common understanding of information across many domains, as a basis for information sharing and interoperability. With 42 states reporting they use NIEM for information exchange, it appears that it’s beyond the tipping point and well on its way to widespread use across the nation.
