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Town Hall Recap: NIEM-UML Stole the Show!

On February 19, we hosted a technically-focused Virtual Town Hall. More than 240 NIEM community members joined to discuss NIEM-UML. We also kicked off the Design Patterns initiative.

Justin Stekervetz, managing director for the NIEM Program Management Office (PMO), began the Virtual Town Hall by providing an update on NIEM-UML, another great tool in the community toolkit that can be used to create exchanges. He noted that NIEM-UML isn't a silver bullet; however, it has real benefits for those who have previous UML experience as well as those who are more visual and have neither XML nor UML experience. If you're using NIEM-UML for information exchange development, we'd like to hear from you. Contact us today at information@NIEM.gov.

Next, Andrew Owen, NIEM Technical Architecture Committee (NTAC) co-chair, provided a high-level demonstration of the community-owned, open source NIEM Modeling Tool. This tool leverages NIEM-UML for NIEM 2.1 to generate XML schema for use in exchanges. Andrew directed Virtual Town Hall participants to GitHub via the NIEM Tools Catalog for more information.

Following Andrew, Webb Roberts, NIEM lead developer, introduced a community-wide initiative – Design Patterns, which are "general, reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems within a given context in software design." We're asking developers and implementers of NIEM information exchanges for their ideas on patterns that are relevant to their immediate information exchange needs and that could potentially drive value across the community. We want to ensure the NIEM program is growing its technical architecture in alignment with community needs. This will ensure that NIEM evolves as technical implementations (e.g., XML Schema, RDF, JSON, Java) evolve. For more information or to get involved, please go toniem.gov/designpatterns.

The Town Hall closed with a Question & Answer session that allowed attendees to ask Justin, Andrew, and Webb questions about NIEM-UML and Design Patterns.

Did you miss the Town Hall? Watch the video and download the PDF presentation here!

Town Halls are essential for the success of the NIEM program because they provide a platform for community members to inform and engage each other and to share their experiences.