Enterprising law enforcement agencies use new technologies to spur cross-border data sharing

Alan Joch, Federal Computer Week

Although XML was first adopted by commercial businesses in the 1990s, law enforcement IT managers worldwide soon embraced it as a tool for smoothing processes such as the distribution of police arrest reports to prosecutors or officers in other jurisdictions. But for years, "it was missing a vocabulary for law enforcement," Wormeli said.

That missing link came with Global Justice XML (GJXML), an XML adaptation created by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs and the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, a consortium of 32 local, state, federal and international justice organizations.

GJXML provides a data model, a data dictionary and schemas tailored to law enforcement. Those tools free agencies from writing custom interfaces for data sharing. "It's being adopted by law enforcement at breakneck speed," Wormeli said.