The XML Factor

The Department of Justice was faced with the usual problem government agencies face -- an aging mainframe that wasn't built to share information. After some deliberation, the department embarked on a modernization quest and settled on extensible markup language (XML) as a way to migrate from the mainframe to a modern system.

XML is an open standard for describing data. It defines data elements on Web pages and business-to-business or government-to-government documents. It's similar to HTML, but HTML defines how data elements are displayed while XML defines what those elements contain.

Because it provides a common method for identifying data, XML could become the dominant format for electronic exchange of data between organizations.

"In our new environment, we chose XML to improve the way we exchange information -- the way we pass information from the input side to the back-end databases and then back to the output," said Lowell Collins, acting CIO of the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Collins said that about a year and a half ago, the department started developing standards to support a message-based environment. Now, when front-end clients used by various levels of state law enforcement and criminal justice agencies request information, the request is translated into XML. That translated requested is then passed to back-end databases and an XML-formatted message is returned to the presentation side.

"We did that in the hopes that, at some point, the standards would mature at the national standards level for law enforcement so we would be in line to pass information using XML at the national level," Collins said.

Though many justice agencies have taken the XML plunge with respect to publishing Web sites, the amount of technology adopted in the back end is difficult to determine.

"Where we found the need inside our organization was from a messaging standpoint," Collins said. "We're putting ourselves in the position where we can easily make changes to our environment when it comes to exchanging information between agencies using messages or transactions. One of the things we had to do was come up with some common format we could use. There's other ways we could have solved that problem, but we chose to use XML as that standard for messaging."

The Department of Justice is currently pilot testing XML-based programs that integrate with other state agencies, such as the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Department of Correction. In the future, such XML-based integrations will be extended to the state's Division of Motor Vehicles.

Collins said he also wants to create an XML-based system to work with municipal criminal justice agencies, but that must wait until other issues are sorted out.


Practical Barriers
The immediate barrier to that interjurisdictional cooperation is the lack of a mandate for the North Carolina Department of Justice to ask local agencies or local governments to change their interface, Collins said. Also, the state can't provide funding for such a change and the federal government hasn't mandated that states make the change to XML-based systems, he added.

Collins said the state's Department of Justice, by making the move to support XML, is ready for local governments and local criminal justice agencies to make their own decision to use XML-based technologies.

Despite some uncertainties, Collins said the future of XML is bright.

"Eventually, we'll see some federal standards for all the criminal justice community for XML as being a standard method by which you define information, whether it's transaction or documents," he said. "And there will be data dictionaries common across the criminal justice environment that will make it easier to develop applications to standard data dictionaries."