NIEMOpen
NIEMOpen (neemopen), frequently referred to as NIEM, originated as an XML-based information exchange framework from the United States, but has transitioned to an OASIS Open Project.
This initiative formalizes NIEM's designation as an official standard in national and international policy and procurement.
NIEM offers a common vocabulary that enables effective information exchanges across diverse public and private organizations.
The purpose of this partnership is to effectively and efficiently share critical information at key decision points throughout the whole of the justice, public safety, emergency and disaster management, intelligence, United States Department of Defense and homeland security enterprise.
Today, NIEMOpen is sponsored by the Joint Staff J6 Directorate within the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S"&"T), the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) within the U.S. FBI, Equivant, Georgia Tech Research Institute, the National Association for Justice Information Systems, sFractal Consulting LLC, the IJIS Institute, the US Department of Transportation, and the Virginia Office of Data Governance and Analytics.
NIEM provides a working and collaborative partnership among governmental agencies, operational practitioners, systems developers, and standards bodies across Federal, State, Local, Tribal, Territorial, International and Private organizations.
NIEM is cited in the JADC2 Reference Architecture (RA) Version 3.0 Enclosure D (JADC2 Capability Development and Analytical Framework) within the Application and services, Interface and Data & Information principals.
As an interagency project it was expanded to include other federal and state agencies such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, United States Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and others.
NIEM is designed to facilitate the creation of automated enterprise-wide information exchanges which can be uniformly developed, centrally maintained, quickly identified and discovered, and efficiently reused.
The IEP represents a set of data that is actually transmitted between agencies for a specific business purpose (e.g., initiating a charging document by the local prosecutor).
For purposes of NIEM, a domain refers to a business enterprise broadly reflecting the agencies, units of government, operational functions, services, and information systems which are organized or affiliated to meet common objectives.
Each domain traditionally includes a cohesive group of data stewards who are subject matter experts (SMEs), have some level of authority within the domains they represent, and participate in the processes related to harmonizing conflicts and resolving data component ambiguities.
COIs reuse data components and artifacts found in NIEM to document their information exchanges.
One or more COIs can coordinate to develop new domain content as they identify gaps in the data components needed for documenting information exchanges.
Grantees developing inter-agency XML-based exchanges must comply with the special condition language contained in the grant, and follow the associated NIEM implementation guidelines.
In 2022, NIEM created a training video series on NIEM.gov/learn that includes a technical deep dive and is intended to support developers and implementers.
NIEM.gov provides written training materials, such as briefings and process-related documentation on NIEM GitHub, as well as other resources, such as the National Information Sharing Standards Help Desk and Knowledge Base.
A selection of online materials are also available both from the main NIEM.gov web site and resources such as Youtube.com (search on NIEM training).
It also serves as a starting point for those wishing to contact NIEM staff with questions, support, and information requests.
An optional extension schema may be used to add extended types and properties for components not contained in NIEM, but which are needed for the exchange.
There are two approaches for extending the NIEM data model for use in information exchange schemas and documents.
It would be impractical and unwieldy to include all possible domain model-specific properties in NIEM Core schemas for general use.
Typically these may be drawn from an Enterprise Data Model (EDM) and then exported and refactored as XML components that conform to the NIEM NDR.
The tools implement all of the structural and content features of the release, including the NIEM NDR.
NIEM's well-defined interfaces and output products also support the development of independent third-party tools.
The NIEM data model contains over 12,000 elements and represents over a dozen domains; subsets allows users developing an IEPD to select only what they need based on the specific requirements of the exchange.
Users can upload a single NIEM XML schema or a zip file (typically representing an IEPD) and view or download the results as a conformance report.
Movement enables the user to search and explore the content of the latest NIEM release.
