What is a data component?
The fundamental building block of NIEM is a data component. Data components are the basic business data items that describe common concepts used in general business activities.
Information that is exchanged between agencies can be broken down into individual componentsfor example, information about people, places, material things, and events. Data components (within an information exchange) commonly shared and understood among all domains are identified as Universal Components (e.g., person, address and organization), while components used in exchanges between multiple domains, but not universally shared, are identified as Common Components (e.g., offense, sentence, and disposition). Components managed by a specific community of interest (e.g., appellate case decision and arrest agency) are considered domain-specific.
In operational settings and emergency situations, the full collection of information that is exchanged between agencies (for example, information regarding the arrest of a person will include not only descriptive and personal identification data regarding the individual-the person component described above-but also information about their alleged offense, the location of the offense, arresting officer, etc.) can be organized into an Information Exchange Package (IEP). The IEP represents a set of data that is transmitted for a specific business purpose. It includes the actual eXtensible Markup Language (XML) instance that delivers the payload or information. Additional information regarding this specific exchange can be further documented in the form of Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD), with data describing the structure, content and other artifacts of the information exchange.
