​Past

With roots in state and local government, NIEM is a community-driven, government-wide, standards-based approach to exchanging information.

It started with a group of 20 states that joined forces to overcome the challenges of exchanging information across state and city government boundaries.

This grassroots effort, called the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, set into motion the creation of a seamless, interoperable model for data exchange that could solve a range of information-sharing challenges across a variety of government agencies. After a two-year effort, the first pre-release of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) was announced in April 2003.

Parallel to the GJXDM effort was the stand up of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The mention of metadata in the president’s strategy for homeland security in the summer of 2002 galvanized the homeland security community to begin working towards standardization.

These collaborative efforts by the justice and homeland security communities—to produce a set of common, well-defined data elements for data exchange development and harmonization—lead to the beginnings of NIEM.

Built upon GJXDM's success and lessons learned from utilizing it, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) was launched in 2005, uniting key stakeholders from federal, state, local, and tribal governments to develop and deploy a national model for information sharing and the organizational structure to govern it.

NIEM was formally initiated in April 2005 by the chief information officers of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice. In October 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services joined as the third steward of NIEM.

Since 2005, NIEM has issued three releases: 1.0 in 2006, 2.0 in 2007, and 2.1 in 2009.

Present

With anticipated delivery in fall 2013, NIEM is working towards a release of NIEM version 3.0.

All 50 states and 19 federal agencies are committed to using NIEM at varying levels of maturity.

Through North America Day efforts, NIEM exchanges are being developed to allow for a more efficient and consistent method of sharing important public health and safety information, representing a significant first step in the development of a borderless network of information exchange between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Wondering about the use of NIEM abroad? Read our case study highlighting NIEM adoption in Europe!

Have you heard about NIEM-UML? Learn more here.​