Civil information integration and interoperability

Abstract

The Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer (CIO) published a memorandum declaring that the Department will adopt the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) in Fiscal Year (FY) 2015. The document established the role of pilot work in FY14 as a risk mitigation technique and to garner lessons learned. NIEM provides a foundation for information exchange between federal, state, local, and tribal agencies as well as international and industry partners. Pilot work was undertaken where, for the first time, took tactical level disaster assessment information from a Civil Affairs information system named Civil Information Management (CIM) Data Processing System (DPS) and expressed it in a NIEM conformant manner. The NIEM objects were then shared and integrated across four separate systems reaching a wide variety of stakeholders. This methodological approach takes critically important disaster information and integrates it into systems in order to promote better situational awareness, to enable operations, to plan disaster response, coordinate disaster management. The same approach can be leveraged to enable humanitarian aid project planning as it ingests live project data across multiple development sectors.