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 Information Exchange Package Documentation for Community Corrections Community corrections agencies increasingly need to share information with its justice system counterparts and with entities outside the criminal justice system, including the private sector, public safety agencies, and the intelligence community and others involved in homeland security. In order to exchange information effectively, it is necessary that data be semantically consistent and therefore understandable by all who share it. The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), a partnership of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, was built on the Global Justice XML Data Model to establish information exchange standards and processes. The NIEM exchange development methodology results in a semantically consistent data format, enabling a common understanding of shared information. The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) funded a previous project administered by the American Probation and Parole Association in which a working group of subject matter experts identified some of the many community corrections information exchange points (IEPs), and modeled the domains of four of those IEPs. The working group was facilitated by technical experts from the National Law Enforcement and Technology Center Northeast (NLECTC-NE) who used the group’s input to create NIEM-compliant IEP reference documents including artifacts, schemas, and associated documentation for Pre-Sentence Investigations, Violation of Probation reports, Interstate Compact Transfer Requests, and Intrastate Transfer Requests. Recognizing that much remains to be done to develop effective information exchange between community corrections and other entities inside and outside the justice system, BJA awarded another grant to APPA to convene a series of three meetings of subject matter experts to continue the process of identifying and modeling domains for community corrections IEPs. These working group meetings will be facilitated by a technical expert from SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics who will use the group’s domain models to produce IEP reference documents, exchange models, mapping spreadsheets, and NIEM 2.0-conformant schema for submission to BJA for ultimate posting to the Office of Justice Programs’ online IEPD Clearinghouse (http://www.it.ojp.gov/iepd/). For further information, please contact: Pat Bancroft |
