Comments on Agenda for Face to Face meeting in New Orleans

I am sorry that I missed the TC conference call on Tuesday; couldn’t be helped. I’ve just reviewed the meeting notes and with respect to the upcoming face to face meeting in New Orleans, have some concerns.

First, the OASIS IJTC does not represent any domain of interest, and although members have participated in the IEPD efforts, the TC should probably not be the entity attempting to take the lead in creating a domain IEPD. This objective would not support the methodology/plan for IEPDs defined by the Global Training and Technical Assistance Committee (GTTAC).

Now that we have some content defined, we are beginning to revisit the topic of governance, including validation, vetting and life-cycle maintenance issues associated with reference IEPDs, including (1) IEPDs as samples/project starting points; (2) IEPDs as jurisdictional standards (i.e., a state standard for incident data); and (3) IEPDs as national standards (i.e., NIBRS and other statistical crime reporting). Organizations addressing IEPD governance strategies include NGA, NASCIO, SEARCH, NCSC, IACP, the FBI etc. As a charter member of the original LegalXML and OASIS IJTC, I sincerely believe that the domain organizations are the appropriate place for governance and leadership of the IEPDs, not the TC.

Second, one thing that we have learned building IEPDs this year is that there is no simple automated process or tool to do this. Period. There is no magic GJXDM bullet! During our several projects this year to build IEPDs, we have not found a way to simply automate this process, using any tool or product.

Reference IEPDs developed by SEARCH and other justice partners provide good baseline models for information exchange because they have been developed collaboratively by public sector subject matter experts and technical developers. I think that it is also very important that we have developed these with open source, non-proprietary tools (and that includes the court documents, although I’m not sure what has happened to those.) What has been critically important is the subject matter expertise that has helped us to associate GJXDM components and use inheritance correctly, to build domain models that represent the business requirements of the exchange, before proceeding with the GJXDM mapping and schema creation. We learned this methodology from Pennsylvania, we didn’t just make this up.

Bottom line, the IEPD artifacts provided as reference models for public consumption must be in a non-proprietary, user accessible format. Any tool to enable the process must also be non-proprietary and available on the web as a download with easily accessed directions for use. Take the Wayfarer, for example…the user doesn’t have to contract with, or even contact Tom Carlson (now there is an idea!) to use his tool. Jurisdictions, if they wish to utilize proprietary applications or tools are always free to do so. But Reference Models must be developed for the public domain, especially since we are using public funding to do so!

I have to ask, why does the TC need spend any of our limited time looking at any tools, especially proprietary tools? This completely contradicts the spirit of this work that many of us have been engaged in, in good faith and to which we have contributed our individual, agency, and company resources, since the beginning of this decade. The TC is not the appropriate place for marketing, no matter how slick the product is purported to be. We have important work on the MNDR to accomplish and limited time to do this. My recommendation would be that we focus on this objective first and foremost.

Catherine Plummer
Justice Information Systems Specialist
SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics
catherine.plummer@search.org
505-771-1651/Cell 505-715-0379 **NEW
http://www.search.org

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