NIEM Newsletter
NIEM Executive Briefing Webinar Recording Available
A NIEM Executive Briefing, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was delivered via Webinar on November 14, 2007. The audio recording with slides is now available at: https://www110.livemeeting.com/cc/ijisinstitute/view?id=8DBB9B&pw=c_2M%5Cb
To view the Webinar recording:
- Select the “View Recording” link.
- Enter first and last name in the appropriate fields.
- Select “View Recording.”
- Enter the e-mail address and company name in the appropriate fields.
- Select “View Recording.”
- The briefing will begin with both audio and visual recordings.
NIEM Leadership Changes
Kshemendra Paul, former Chief Architect for the U.S. Department of Justice and NIEM Executive Director, has taken over as Acting Chief Architect at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). While at the U.S. Department of Justice, he led efforts around data standards and interoperability with federal, state, and local stakeholders, resulting in the adoption of NIEM as the basis for terrorism information sharing as well as grassroots-based adoption and use of NIEM for cross-domain, cross-level of government information sharing. Mr. Paul was a tireless advocate for the NIEM program. He brought structure to the NIEM Program Management Office and recognized the importance of including private industry leaders and other domains in the NIEM efforts. Mr. Paul received numerous accolades and praise for his work with NIEM, including his selection as one of this year's Federal 100—the top executives from government, industry, and academia who had the greatest impact on the government information systems community in 2006. In his new role, Mr. Paul will be responsible for defining policies and processes for conducting enterprise architecture activities across the entire federal government—including overall mission performance management and resource allocation— ensuring that he continues to play a role in cross-governmental data standards work.
Jeremy Warren is currently serving as Acting NIEM Executive Director and is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the U. S. Department of Justice, where his responsibilities include formulating the department's technology strategy; providing technology expertise in program oversight and other contexts; performing research, evaluations, and proofs-of-concept; and serving as a coordinator of all aspects of the department's technical architecture.
As part of his duties, Mr. Warren oversees the technical aspects of the development and implementation of the department’s Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program (LEISP), which includes initiatives such as N-DEx, R-DEx, and LEXS. In addition, he serves as the cochair of the NIEM Technical Architecture Committee (NTAC).
NIEM Team Wins Justice Management Division Leadership Award
The NIEM Team was recognized by U.S. Assistant Attorney General Lee Lofthus and Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig Morford for the collaborative work across multiple agencies required to implement the NIEM Program. Representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of the Chief Information Officer, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were presented the awards by Chief Information Officer Van Hitch. The Bureau of Justice Assistance was singled out for its significant contributions, including the development of the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, which served as the foundation for NIEM.
New NIEM Communications and Outreach Committee (NC&OC) Cochair Appointed
Denis Gusty has been appointed cochair of the NC&OC. In this role, Mr. Gusty is responsible for managing communications regarding NIEM and supporting active engagement by a broad array of users and practitioners.
Mr. Gusty serves as the Acting Director of the Command, Control and Interoperability Division’s (CCI’s) Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC). In addition, he leads OIC’s Disaster Management program, which aims to improve incident response and recovery by developing tools and messaging standards that help emergency responders manage incidents and exchange information in real time. Mr. Gusty comes to CCI from the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), where he served as Director of GSA’s Office of Intergovernmental Solutions. Prior to joining GSA, Mr. Gusty served as a program manager at the U.S. Department of Labor. In this role, he was responsible for helping to implement the President’s Management Agenda by managing the e-Government initiative, GovBenefits.gov. Mr. Gusty has more than four years of experience in developing intergovernmental partnerships and IT policy and practices.
Mr. Gusty joins Paul Wormeli as cochair of the NC&OC. Mr. Wormeli has served as NC&OC chair since 2006 and is Executive Director of the IJIS Institute, a nonprofit corporation formed to help state and local governments develop ways to share information among the disciplines engaged in law enforcement and justice administration. Mr. Wormeli has had a long career in the field of law enforcement and justice technology. He has been active in the development of software products, has managed system implementation for dozens of agencies throughout the world, and has managed national programs in support of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies.
Approach to Using Intelligence Community Security Markings (IC-ISM)
Background
Until recently, the schema for the Intelligence Community Information Security Marking (IC-ISM) standard was considered for official use only (FOUO) and could not be published. Therefore, NIEM 2.0 could not integrate components of IC-ISM without publishing the IC-ISM schema. This document describes actions to restore the ability to use IC-ISM within NIEM 2.0 and future releases.
The IC-ISM standard is an XML Schema described in the IC-ISM Data Element Dictionary and the Implementation Guide. It is one of the Intelligence Community (IC) Metadata Standards for Information Assurance and is the preferred way to apply information security markings within XML instances. Until recently, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) considered the current version of the IC-ISM schema (Version 2, IC-ISM-V2.xsd, dated April 30, 2004) to be labeled FOUO. Therefore, the schema could not be published. Recent correspondence with DNI has confirmed the schema and associated stylesheets are no longer FOUO, although the Data Element Dictionary and the Implementation Guide do remain FOUO.
NIEM 1.0 contains both IC-ISM attributes (copied into a local namespace) as well as earlier security elements (from the Global Justice XML Data Model). However, the older (GJXDM) security elements were removed from NIEM 2.0 because they duplicated IC-ISM attributes. The FOUO status of the IC-ISM schema was discovered at the same time NIEM 2.0 was being released. To ensure validation of NIEM 2.0, IC-ISM could not be integrated into NIEM 2.0 without publishing IC-ISM-v2.xsd. The removal of FOUO status now enables NIEM to incorporate the IC-ISM attributes more easily. However, since NIEM 2.0 has already been released, complete integration of IC-ISM into NIEM will have to wait until a future release.
NIEM 1.0 (includes copies of IC-ISM attributes)
NIEM 1.0 includes a copy of the IC-ISM attributes in its own local namespace; therefore, no action is required to enable users to employ IC-ISM within NIEM 1.0.
NIEM 2.0 (immediate use of IC-ISM)
NIEM 2.0 has no built-in components for security marking of data. However, the metadata mechanism in NIEM 2.0 provides a method for using IC-ISM attributes immediately by defining them in a metadata container with an s:id attribute. An element in an instance that must use IC-ISM metadata simply links to the appropriate metadata container element (with IDREF and ID type attributes s:metadata and s:id, respectively).
Note that this method is only an interim solution designed to allow users to use IC-ISM within NIEM 2.0 immediately. This is neither the preferred nor the proposed method for the future. The intelligence community would prefer that ISM metadata be defined as attributes contained within the element being described. However, this is not possible without updating NIEM 2.0 and the NIEM NDR (to be described in the next section).
To use IC-ISM consistently, users should insert both the NIEM icism-metadata.xsd schema and IC-ISM-V2.xsd (both attached to this document) into the following schema locations within the NIEM 2.0 reference set or subset they are using:
niem/icism/2.0/icism-metadata.xsd
niem/icism/2.0/IC-ISM-V2.xsd
NIEM 2.1 and future releases (improved use of IC-ISM)
To facilitate the preferred use of the IC-ISM standard in NIEM will require, in sequence:
- Completion of the NIEM versioning architecture.
- A forward-compatible release update to NIEM 2.0.
- Minor change(s) to the NIEM NDR.
- Governance Committee review and approval.
An outline of the proposed longer-term solution is as follows:
- Add all IC-ISM attributes in the SecurityAttributesOptionGroup (within IC-ISM-V2.xsd) directly to all NIEM high-level object types that might need information-security markings. These properties will be inherent attributes to all subsequently derived types. Therefore, this will be the intelligence community’s best practice for using the IC-ISM attributes. Further, since this addition is a purely nondestructive change, forward compatibility with NIEM 2.0 will be preserved; i.e., instances built for NIEM 2.0 will also validate with this release.
- Change the NDR to account for importing an additional namespace that is not NIEM-conforming but that will not affect instance conformance validation. Since the IC-ISM attributes will be added as defined in IC-ISM directly to NIEM, there will be no impact to NIEM instances.
The new IC-ISM components will automatically become visible and usable in the NIEM tool set when the updates to NIEM described in Item 1 above are implemented and published in an official release.
Upcoming NIEM Trainings
Other upcoming NIEM trainings include:
- December 10–14, 2007: State of Connecticut Judicial Branch
- January 7–11, 2008: West Virginia—U.S. Department of Justice and CJIS
- January 22–25, 2008: Sacramento, CA
- February 11–15, 2008: Ashburn, VA—U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and CJIS
For further information or questions about NIEM training, please contact training@ijis.org for further information.