NIEM Makes NIEM 5.0 Available for Public

This major release underlines the importance and significance of NIEM as a force multiplier to allow stable, flexible enterprise-level data interoperability across diverse, complex systems and organizations.

FREMONT, CA: The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) recently announced the publication and general availability of NIEM 5.0. NIEM offers a model framework with rules and guidance designed to develop reliable, well-defined enterprise level information exchanges. This major release underlines the importance and significance of NIEM as a force multiplier to allow stable, flexible enterprise-level data interoperability across diverse, complex systems and organizations. The release lays out the foundation for the NIEM metamodel currently under development.

“NIEM 5.0 represents three years of extensive NIEM user-community input, development, and harmonization efforts to deliver information exchange solutions addressing our users’ needs,” said Katherine Escobar, Managing Director, NIEM Management Office. She continued, “With NIEM’s community-powered, open source approach, users directly contribute both content and technical expertise, propelling NIEM’s growth forward with timely solutions to challenging interoperability problems.”

NIEM 5.0 Highlights

• Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) metadata.

• Profile of Refined Geography Markup Language (GML).

• Substantial changes to the Digital Data Exchange (NDEx) National Crime Information Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Uniform Crime Reporting Code Tables.

• Public Health Emergency Operations Center (PH-EOC) Minimum Data Set.

• Simpler configuration of the release folder and elimination of version numbers from file paths.

• Modified character encoding (from US-ASCII to UTF-8) and the inclusion of the XML: lang attribute to the reference scheme for improved international support.

• NIEM JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Output schema, offering the foundation for creating the JSON Schema for unique exchanges.

• Generic Statistical Information Model (GSIM) content.

• Several changes of the Harmonization Material to the NIEM Center and various domains.

NIEM enables the safe exchange of knowledge by establishing meanings, relationships, and mechanisms to share data between domains and communities of interest. NIEM’s Core incorporates data components within knowledge-sharing elements that are freely accessible to all NIEM users. New and revised NIEM 5.0 standards best explain what data looks like and what it entails. The NIEM Extensibility Intensity helps different domains identify data elements related to their particular needs and specifications.

NIEM is actively facilitating exchanges between 15 chartered domains and communities of interest. These are created when organizations understand the need for a stable, rapid exchange of data. NIEM membership comprises delegates from federal, state, regional, tribal, private, and foreign organizations.

An example of the NIEM community’s strong participation in 5.0 growth is the NIEM Harmonization Workgroup, which supervised the process of harmonization. Several dozen NIEM users/volunteers engaged actively in the Core and cross-domain content review process. Group remodeled and refactored material to enhance continuity and encourage re-use. In general, the community reviewed over a thousand components and addressed more than eighty harmonization and technical problems.