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NIEM Celebrates a Decade!

Happy Birthday NIEM! It’s hard to believe the program has hit double digits.

In 2005, a few individuals from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security had the idea to leverage the great work already in place for XML-based information exchange across the Justice community, the Global Justice XML Data model (GJXDM). Based on the foresight and determination of all involved, the NIEM Program has helped organizations save time and money by providing consistent, reusable data terms and definitions and repeatable processes. We’ve come a long way in the last 10 years—the Program is maturing and our user community keeps growing.

Expanding to New Domains

Collaboration across different mission spaces and organizations is critical—areas that previously operated autonomously may need to share information with others in order to be successful in their operations. Although NIEM started as a national Justice and Public Safety effort, the NIEM community has grown well beyond that initial intent. We’ve added Domains such as Military Operations and Human Services and have adoption by international partners such as Australia and Canada. As NIEM continues to grow, it will enable an even broader range of public and private organizations to exchange information effectively and efficiently.

Collaborating with Industry

Industry support is essential—without industry involvement, we wouldn’t have a Program that can boast great success stories. Industry provides tools and solutions that ensure consistency and aid with development, ultimately allowing NIEM users to spend more time solving mission-critical problems. Over the past few years, NIEM has developed a NIEM-UML (Unified Modeling Language) profile, which has both commercial and open source tooling to support exchange development. In addition, the Geospatial Enhancement for NIEM effort (Geo4NIEM) continues to be a successful, collaborative public-private partnership between the NIEM Program, cross-governmental partners, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The Geo4NIEM effort is establishing guidance on how to create NIEM content and leverage it in map-based environments, using the OGC industry standards, rather than requiring costly development of redundant data objects for the NIEM community.

How Are We Celebrating?

We want to thank everyone who has played a part over the years for your support and dedication. Check out our videos—we’re celebrating NIEM’s birthday with a series of videos highlighting some NIEM success stories.

Here’s to NIEM’s future—we’re excited about the possibilities!