NIEM to ingest intell tags

• By Joab Jackson
• Jan 02, 2008

Systems that deploy the National Information Exchange Model will now be able to use a classification schema heretofore unavailable for public use, according to NIEM administrators.

Finalized in 2004, the Intelligence Community Information Security Marking (IC-ISM) offered a set of tags that could be used to mark sensitive documents with the classification levels and conditions. However, the Director of National Intelligence restricted use of the tags to official use only (FOUO), so they could not be incorporated into NIEM, which is a publicly available schema.

According to a NIEM newsletter released last month, DNI has removed the schema from the FOUO status (though IC-ISM's Data Element Dictionary and Implementation Guide will remain FOUO). As a result, the IC-ISM elements and attributes can be used within NIEM. "The removal of FOUO status now enables NIEM to incorporate the IC-ISM attributes more easily," the electronic missive read.

For use within NIEM version 2.0, users are encouraged to use a metadata container in order to incorporate IC-ISM. Future versions of NIEM will incorporate IC-ISM directly into its own schema.

A partnership between the Justice and Homeland Security departments, the NIEM initiative is a program to develop information exchange standards for law enforcement agencies across state and federal agencies.