technical standards

Did you know you had a piece of spinach in your teeth before someone told you?
Did you know just how bad your haircut was until you saw yourself on Facebook?
Can the NIEM Program Management Office know what you need if you don’t provide input?

The answer to all three questions is no!

Since August 2012, the NIEM community has been working on NIEM Version 3.0—the next major release of the NIEM model. The last time we had a major new release was 2007! NIEM 3.0 is on schedule to launch in fall 2013!

As a community-driven program, NIEM relies on its stakeholders to provide feedback on major developments such as Version 3.0.

So…be sure to mark your calendars and tell your NIEM friends! The anticipated release of NIEM 3.0 Alpha 2 for broad public review is April 19​—stay tuned!

We recently gathered with over 100 government, industry, and non-profit professionals to brainstorm and debate information sharing and safeguarding standards and frameworks at the Workshop for Information Sharing and Safeguarding Standards (WIS3). Below is a brief summary of some of the challenges and solutions that government and industry leaders discussed at WIS3. This is by no means comprehensive, though, and we plan to release more robust outlines of the challenges that our community faces and our plans for solutions soon.

At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we are committed to ensuring secure and timely access to information critical to our mission. To this end, we have updated our Information Sharing Segment Architecture (ISSA) to provide a roadmap that guides our implementation and investment efforts in information sharing, while developing the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) for the homeland security enterprise.

Our mission is to advance responsible information sharing–not by building a system or mandating policy, but by convening government agencies, engaging industry and other partners, and supporting their information sharing efforts. One of the main ways we do this is by promoting adoption of technical standards throughout government and industry so that more information sharing capabilities are built in to systems from the beginning.

Early last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and two other members of the intelligence community began a data exchange pilot program with support from the office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment. The goal of the pilot was to not only develop a successful data exchange methodology for these agencies, but also to track best practices and lessons learned with the intent to share them with other federal agencies and ultimately expand responsible federal information sharing.

Information sharing between federal, state, local, tribal and territorial partners is critical to our nation’s security. Today, I am pleased to announce that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has updated our Information Sharing Segment Architecture (ISSA) that will serve as a road map to guide our implementation and investment efforts in information sharing.

Over the past year and a half, we have collaboratively built the NIEM-UML Profile.  Many have asked: What is it?  How can I use it?

To help, we developed a series of five videos on NIEM-UML.  Watch them today!

Note: If you are interested in other NIEM webinars or you can’t view the YouTube videos below, visit NIEM.gov/webinars for different format and topic options.