:: Deepquest ::

An federal initiative launched earlier this year, called the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), seeks to identify a core set of schemas and ensure their standardization, said Michael Daconta, the Homeland Security Department’s metadata program manager.
An overabundance of Extensible Markup Language schemas could replace incompatible systems as the major barrier to information exchange, Daconta said, speaking April 28 at an ArchitecturePlus Seminar in Washington, D.C.

As agencies begin implementing service-oriented architectures, which depend on XML for data exchange, NIEM officials want to expand the accepted set of common schemas by finding more participants, Daconta said. Environmental Protection Agency officials have been briefed, he added. So far, the Justice, Homeland Security, Transportation departments and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have signed up for NIEM. A project Web site became active earlier this week, he said.

The project seeks to identify two categories of common XML schemas: a universal core shared by every information domain and more specialized overlapping schemas specific to just some of the domains.

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