Building upon the success of its nationally-recognized data-sharing and integration solutions for leveraging the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) standard, Sypherlink recently announced the availability of the NIEM Harmonizer Hub component. NIEM Harmonizer Hub simplifies and streamlines the adoption and use of the NIEM and LEXS (Logical Entity Exchange Specification) standards. Using NIEM Harmonizer Hub, a local, state, tribal or federal agency may easily build NIEM-conformant messages that can simultaneously support regional information sharing, as well as participate in statewide solutions such as the Texas Data Exchange (T-DEx) and the FBI’s Law Enforcement National Data Exchange (N-DEx) Program.

According to Sypherlink CEO James Paat, the NIEM Harmonizer Hub component completes another important milestone in Sypherlink’s solution roadmap for fully supporting bi-directional message exchanges using the federal NIEM standard.

“Building upon Sypherlink’s current NIEM Harmonizer solution, which enables local agencies to easily map and generate NIEM/LEXS compliant messages, NIEM Harmonizer Hub now enables recipients to easily ingest incoming data so that local, regional or state target applications can appropriately consume and route the data,” said Paat. “In addition, it’s designed to help aggregate incoming messages from multiple contributing agencies, to more efficiently participate in federal efforts, such as FBI N-DEx or the National SAR (Suspicious Activity Reporting) Initiative.”

According to Paat critical crime-fighting efforts like N-DEx rely heavily on large data aggregation programs, usually run by a state justice or public safety department, for their information. “Aggregators now have a ready-built solution for quickly and effectively setting up a data exchange which is NIEM conformant,” he said. 

The first production instance of NIEM Harmonizer Hub was recently completed to support the Dallas County Secure Data Exchange (DC-DEx), a program designed to serve as the foundation for law enforcement data sharing across the county’s 26 cities, improving court processing and other information-rich workflow procedures.  At the same time, NIEM Harmonizer Hub aggregates incident and arrest data so that Dallas County can submit messages to T-DEx and, ultimately, to the N-DEx program. 

Sypherlink’s pre-built NIEM Harmonizer components offer both inbound and outbound NIEM translation capabilities which support simple and complex XML requirements, including the Department of Justice’s LEXS framework, which is leveraged by such agencies as the FBI. NIEM Harmonizer Hub can be configured in one of two modes:

• Warehouse Mode – where the hub software accepts NIEM data based upon the LEXS Publish/Describe (LEXS-PD) protocol, and writes to a central repository; or
• Federated Mode – which provides a service-oriented-architecture (SOA)-based interface to allow applications to invoke queries to data sources using the LEXS Search/Retrieve (LEXS-SR) specification.
  

SOURCE: Sypherlink Introduces NIEM Data Sharing Hub