Global Standards Council

The Global Standards Council (GSC) serves as a Global Advisory Committee (GAC) subcommittee, supporting broad-scale electronic sharing of pertinent justice- and public safety-related information by recommending to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), through the GAC, associated information sharing standards and guidelines.

Resources

About the GSC

The Global Standards Council employs an enterprise architecture approach for developing and maintaining the cohesive body of Global standards as one Global Standards Package (GSP) (further defined below). That architecture and its associated GSP artifacts consists of:

1. Guidance on the design, specification, and implementation of services (and related infrastructure) as part of a justice Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This justice SOA-based architecture is more commonly known as the Global Reference Architecture—an approach to information sharing and an information exchange solution designed to cut 80 percent of implementation time and costs for state and local justice agencies through reuse of established promising practices in IT architecture and design. To learn more about the GRA and affiliated standards, please follow this GRA link.
    
2. Guidelines and standards for establishing, implementing, and governing federated identity management approaches. Federated identity allows a user’s roles, rights, and privileges to be communicated securely in the justice community and, in particular, to those who hold the information required to effectively safeguard our nation. The Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM) framework provides the justice community and partner organizations with a standards-based approach for implementing federated identity. To learn more about GFIPM and affiliated standards, please follow this GFIPM link.
    
3. A framework for automating access control (in particular, privacy) policy as part of information exchange. Converting privacy policy to a form understandable to computers continues to be a significant problem and a high priority for the justice community. Implementing Privacy Policy in Justice Information Sharing: A Technical Framework seeks to fill this need by exploring approaches and alternatives to resolve technical and interoperability challenges in supporting privacy policy through automation. The full technical framework and an executive summary of the same are available at the included links.

   Justice-to-Health Information Sharing:

   The value of stronger communication and, in particular, stronger interoperable “electronic” information sharing between the Justice and Health domains has been recognized by both communities. To that end, the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) embarked on an incremental collaborative process to identify high-priority justice-to-health interexchange opportunities that not only would provide the most beneficial use for the justice community but would also align with the top information exchange priorities identified by the health community. 

   Global dovetailed its work from the results of a Bureau of Justice Assistance-sponsored project led by the IJIS Institute and the Urban Institute that identified 34 beneficial opportunities for interdomain information exchange between the justice and health communities. “Used judiciously, and with the necessary legal and technical safeguards to protect privacy and confidentiality, bi-directional sharing of health information between community-based care providers and correctional institutions can be used to divert individuals from the criminal justice system (when appropriate), better provide for their health needs while under justice supervision, and prepare for a successful post-release transition to the community” – Opportunities for Information Sharing to Enhance Health and Public Safety Outcomes.  In turn, Global charged the Global Strategic Solutions Working Group (GSSWG) to assemble a team of justice and health practitioners to review the 34 exchanges with a focus on identifying those exchanges with the greatest potential benefit to the criminal justice community.  In a report titled “Prioritizing Justice-to-Health Exchanges Task Team Final Report,” the group outlined ten high-value exchanges that focus in large part on sharing treatment and reentry information.  Finally, the Global Standards Council’s Justice-to-Health Services Task Team launched an effort to further explore the technical information sharing alignment between the aforementioned ten exchanges and the highest-priority health domain exchanges.  In a report titled “Aligning Justice-to-Health Priority Exchanges Task Team Final Report,” the resulting analysis suggests four priority business cases that represent the highest alignment, greatest cross-domain business benefit, and the most valuable priorities to the criminal justice treatment and reentry and Pretrial, Courts, and Supervision processes.

   Global invites your attention and review of all three previously mentioned reports.  Please direct questions and comments to [email protected].

   Global Standards Package: The aforementioned enterprise architecture and its associated standards collectively form what is known as the Global Standards Package—the entire body of normative Global standards work maintained by the Global Standards Council. Please access the GSP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) guide here and/or follow this link for a complete listing and access to published artifacts in the Global Standards Package. All GSP standards can also be discovered through the Global Information Sharing Toolkit.