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The Security Equipment Integration Working Group (SEIWG) NIEM IEPD

The Security Equipment Integration Working Group (SEIWG), a subgroup of the Department of Defense’s Physical Security Enterprise & Analysis Group (PSEAG), consists of technical subject matter experts from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. SEIWG fosters interoperability across military services and systems by developing standards that enable interoperability of physical security equipment (PSE).

PSE helps protect personnel and assets at military installations around the world by monitoring and controlling access to facilities, equipment, and resources. Commercial off-the-shelf PSE often uses proprietary standards and is not “plug-and-play.” Equipment must often be purchased as a suite and requires the original vendor to participate in any changes. For example, a gate-mounted camera developed for the Navy cannot interact with an Army command and control platform without developing software to allow them to communicate. This lack of interoperability increases cost, potential errors, duplicative efforts, and time to integrate and test disparate systems.

PSEAG developed the publicly-available, NIEM-conformant SEIWG Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) for PSE data exchanges supporting force protection. Working with the members of the NIEM MilOps domain, the PSEAG team mapped SEIWG data components to components in NIEM Core and the MilOps domain, ensuring that the final IEPD contains semantic concepts applicable across multiple DoD programs. For those SEIWG data components that did not have equivalents in the NIEM Core or MilOps domain, the PSEAG and MilOps teams worked together to ensure that these components were NIEM-conformant. When completed, these components were incorporated into the MilOps domain content, and some were accepted as new content for the NIEM Core.

SEIWG achieved its goal of improving interoperability of PSE. Additionally, the creation of the SEIWG NIEM IEPD increased the MilOps domain content by 30% and raised awareness of the benefits of using NIEM throughout DoD’s force protection community. The SEIWG NIEM IEPD is ready for use among all military branches; federal, state, and local governments; and commercial PSE suppliers. PSEAG also expects to realize long-term cost savings through reuse and repeatable processes.

Details
Organization
Department of Defense
Communities
Best of NIEM Year
2018
Attachments