National Information Exchange Model

NIEM Model is a community-driven approach which originated in the Public Safety and Justice industries in the United States for the exchange of data among organizations by partnering with agencies and organizations in all the government levels and with the private industry. Hence, this model enables organizations to exchange information in an efficient and effective manner in real time with their partners and stakeholders so that they can be able to deliver their missions swiftly.

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Thus, NIEM Model has benefited many American organizations and the government at large in a number of ways. First, NIEM has been realized to be reducing the total cost of ownership in which the organizations exchange information whereby it has facilitated the exchange of information amongst the interested communities (National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). 2010). Besides, this model enhances the provision of methodologies, tools and processes which assist in implementing the systems for interoperable and information exchange. When the exchange of information is facilitated between the existing systems, then the current systems do not require to be replaced.

In order to understand the processes, architecture, purpose and other deliverables of NIEM, some key concepts are used to demonstrate and illustrate the basic knowledge which can help in enabling the use of NIEM effectively. First, the data elements are major building blocks for the database component. They represent concepts and real-world objects. The data generated and exchanged among agencies may be broken down into individual constituents such as information on events, places as well as people. Also, Information Exchange Package Documentation entails the representation of sets of data which are transmitted between the agencies for specific purpose. IEPD ensures that in any operational setting, specific sets of business requirements are supported by this form. Besides, NIEM Core is another concept which illustrates on how the data components are shared universally within the information exchange and thus understood by all the domains such as organization, person and address (National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). 2010). Moreover, the NIEM Conformance gives the rules and guidelines which help in ensuring a proper implementation of the information sharing exchange.

In ensuring that organizational support is enhanced, NIEM has programs which touch on the main areas that can be uplifted so that organizational objectives are achieved. For example, NIEM Program Management Office (PMO) which operates to provide training facilities gives communication, technical assistance and common services. The program also brings all the agencies and stakeholders together so that they can identify the main course of action in dealing with the emergency situations and other important matters. The program develops information sharing standards and provides technical tools, methodologies and processes to ensure the standards are set and attained.

NIEM adopts technical standards where information sharing is done according to the requirements. To begin with, the NIEM schemas are interrelated and define the NIEM data components. Each of the schemas describes its own target namespace. Some of the common XML schemas are constraint schema, support schema, subset schema, exchange schema, NIEM reference schema, and extension schema. The NIEM modeling is an important aspect since it gives a description of attributes and mechanism that enhance meeting of the specific requirements. In this case, the extension techniques is one of the many NIEM modeling concepts that uses two approaches, that is, to create new types of NIEM which represent the new concepts and then to add the new data into the existing NIEM types so as to extend the existing concepts.

NIEM tools which implement the content and all of the structural elements are the information exchange mapping tool, IEPD tool, and schema subset generation tool. These tools perform different roles which gear into a standard NIEM. Due to a strongly enforced system, NIEM has become an outgrowth which has risen from the United States and is set to go international, that is, Canada, Europe and Mexico have bought the idea into their government systems.

Niem Model and Its Relationship to Information Exchange

Information exchange has a long history since it depicts the act of people, organizations, and companies pass information from one source to another. It involves use of a system either formal or informal. Thus, information exchange has developed over time in information technology which has laid an opening into the development of systems such as the NIEM Model. The information exchange involves protocols and messages, and file formats which were initially transferred manually before the adoption of technology (Venugopal et al. 2012).

One of the ways of the ways through which NIEM Model has a relationship to information exchange is through the Electronic data interchange (EDI). This is an implementation of the information exchange which was introduced in the 1970s and has been in use in many models including the NIEW Model. This model has borrowed many structures which have later been implemented into executable systems.

Some of the design patterns of the information exchange that have been implemented by NIEM Model are one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one. Hence, it can be classified that most of the structures contained in the NIEM Model have been implemented from the Information exchange either directly or indirectly.

References

National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). (2010). UCORE and NIEM: Creating Potent New Cross-Boundry Networks.

Venugopal, M., Eastman, C. M., Sacks, R., & Teizer, J. (2012). Semantics of model views for information exchanges using the industry foundation class schema. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 26(2), 411-428.