At a national webinar on November 13th hosted by the IJIS Institute, the NIEMOpen Project Governing Board revealed Version 6.0 of NIEMOpen, the open source framework for building a consensus on data standards that facilitate information sharing across domains. The new version is considered to be a breakthrough in meeting the needs of contemporary technologies in setting semantic and syntactic data standards. It incorporates a common model format that is agnostic regarding the choice of representation for the data model, supporting the use of the model in XML, JSON, or RDF. The new version is slated to become an official, formal standard of OASIS, the internationally acclaimed standards development organization, and ultimately an ISO standard.
Accompanying the release of Version 6.0 will be a new set of concurrent naming and design rules that describe how international naming conventions are employed to harness a standardized way to construct the syntax that facilitates data exchange. Software tools to facilitate the development of specifications for exchanges between agencies and across jurisdictions are also being developed and will support the wider implementation of the NIEMOpen model.
Keynote Speakers Comments
At the Reveal, Kshemendra Paul, the first Program Manager of NIEM in 2005, noted that “NIEMOpen is not your father’s NIEM” as all the changes lead to a more contemporary capability to reflect the will of the collaborative community that embraces the NIEMOpen standard. Teri Takai, Chief Programs Officer at the Center for Digital Government, described our digital future to set the stage for determining how NIEMOpen should evolve to serve multiple domains in the age of AI, emphasizing the need for standards to make data AI-ready. Dr. Kristen Honey, Chief Data Officer at the Department of HHS, spoke about the HHS open data project plans and the necessity of open data standards.
Awards
Maria Cardiellos, Executive Director of the IJIS Institute, on behalf of the Project Governing Board, presented the 2025 NIEMOpen Award of Excellence to Sonoma County, CA, for its innovative application of the NIEMOpen Application Programming Interface (API) in designing a data model in the form of an ontology for a knowledge graph, which powers the modernized integrated justice information system that Sonoma is developing. According to Paul Wormeli, Chairman of the NIEMOpen Project Governing Board, “this application of the NIEMOpen platform represents a novel and important use of NIEMOpen, opening the door to numerous potential improvements in information sharing within and across domains.”
The NIEMOpen Domain Service awards, given for the domains that were involved in the most significant extension and application of the NIEMOpen framework were presented to recognize the two new domains in NIEMOpen—Forensics and Analytical Laboratories. The awards were given to the Department of Defense Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency (DFBA) for the Forensics domain and the Data Standardization Subgroup of the Integrated Consortium of Laboratory Networks (ICLN), under the Office of Health Security in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for the Analytical Laboratories domain.
Dr. Scott Renner received the Chairman’s award for technology innovation for his work in developing the common model format and the accompanying naming and design rules for Version 6.0 of NIEMOpen.