NIEM – A Practical Use Case

If you work with the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) as well as with other standards, you often run into issues related to how your overall work should incorporate (or not incorporate) NIEM. The rules for NIEM allow you to use recognized external standards independently. FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) does this with it implementation of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard (http://shor.tswit.ch/hb). You can also use components from an external Standard within a NIEM conforming schema, but only if you use the formally defined NIEM “Adapter” approach. You can also use NIEM inside an externally defined standard wrapper as shown in the graphic below.

Gary Ham, an Eye Street Solutions team member on the IPAWS Program will be giving a talk at the NIEM National Training Event (NTE) on August 23-25, 2011 in Philadelphia (http://shor.tswit.ch/hc). During this talk he will discuss using an OASIS Emergency Data Exchange Language - Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) as a wrapper as shown in the diagram above, but it will go beyond that. Gary will discuss how NIEM conforming data structures can be used within the EDXL-DE wrapper itself as DE conforming metadata to describe the content and desired distribution of the Information Exchange Package (IEP). The goal is to show an innovative use of NIEM that is actually made possible by the (also) innovative structure designed into the EDXL-DE standard. The actual content of the IEP will be an IPAW Profile conforming CAP message. The wrapping DE will use NIEM conforming metadata to define IPAWS distribution and content identification needs.