History and Background

The Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) Extensible Markup Language (XML) Data Model (Global JXDM) is the result of a collaborative effort of numerous agencies from all levels of the justice and public safety domains. The project was sponsored by the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of Justice, with advice from the Global Advisory Committee (GAC) and coordination by the XML Structure Task Force (XSTF)--an advisory team under the GAC's Global Infrastructure/Standards Working Group (GISWG). The XSTF consists of government and industry domain experts, technical managers, and engineers who identified data requirements, explored XML concepts, and applied XML best practices to the design and implementation of the Global JXDM. Technical development support was provided by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), who played a key role in developing the software foundations for the Global JXDM. GTRI worked with the XSTF to create a comprehensive product that included a data model, a data dictionary, and an XML schema which together became known as the Global JXDM.

The Global JXDM endeavor began in March 2001 as a reconciliation of data definitions and evolved into a broad two-year effort to develop an XML-based framework that would enable the entire justice and public safety communities to effectively share information at all levels--laying the foundation for local, state, tribal, and national justice interoperability.

Approximately 16,000 justice and public safety-related data elements were collected from various local and state government sources. These were analyzed and reduced to around 2,000 unique data elements that were then incorporated into about 300 data objects, or reusable components, resulting in the Global Justice XML Data Dictionary (Global JXDD). The Global JXDD components have inherent qualities enabling access from multiple sources and reuse in multiple applications. In addition, the standardization of the core components resulted in significant potential for increased interoperability among and between justice and public safety information systems.