Florida eyes $15M data integration plan for law enforcement agencies

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February 06, 2006 (Computerworld) -- The Florida Department of Law Enforcement this month will begin a $15 million, yearlong effort to integrate the back-end systems of 500 law enforcement agencies across the state so they can share data.
The first phase of the Florida Law Enforcement Exchange (FLEX) project is to inventory data housed in the records management systems of the various agencies and create a metadata management layer for the new data exchange system, according to state officials.
Workers in the state's law enforcement offices must now use the phone or e-mail to find out if an agency in a different part of the state has any information related to cases under investigation. With FLEX, users will be able to access statewide law enforcement data with a single query, said Brenda Owens, the state's CIO.
"Our goal is to provide seamless access to data across the state," Owens said. "An operator sitting at a PC in a police department doesn't know or care what the data looks like; they can put the inquiry in and get the information back. You have to have a common language, a common understanding of what is out there before you start sharing."
In large integration projects such as FLEX, simply getting various organizations to agree on what metadata to use often can derail or substantially delay efforts to link systems. In Florida, individual agencies have worked together to share data as part of eight regional groups.
However, these regional groups did not want to be forced to log out of their native records management applications and log into a new application to do statewide queries, according to Mike Phillips, technical coordinator for the FLEX project. To provide data translation, FLEX will use a data sharing standard developed by the U.S. Department of Justice called the Federal Global Justice XML Data Model.
While the decision to use the Justice Department's XML model to do data translation means each region can continue to use its own applications as part of FLEX, law enforcement officials still needed to find a way to extract existing data definitions from each region and to create a common vocabulary for statewide data exchanges, Phillips said.
Most of the regions have been manually mapping the metadata needed to exchange information with other regional agencies, a method that would not allow FLEX to be completed by its March 2007 deadline. To speed up the integration process, the state will use Dublin, Ohio-based Sypherlink Inc.'s Harvester metadata discovery and mapping tool to map data from the disparate systems to the data model for the project.
"We got the groups to agree that we will use a tool to import the data schemas of the applications that are already there, [and] then we are going to determine the common elements as our strategic points to share data," Phillips said. "We saw that as an area where we could save a considerable amount of time on the front end and on the back end to maintain these data mappings as the sources change."
Because that plan won't require agencies to rewrite their applications, it was seen as the least threatening way to encourage participants to share data, he said. In addition, using a tool to discover and map metadata will be 50% faster than traditional manual methods.
State officials plan to wrap up the data-mapping phase of FLEX by June. They are now completing the training of users on Harvester and already have compiled a dictionary of basic data elements within the regions, Phillips said.
The second phase of FLEX calls for the installation of a server infrastructure for exchanging data. The state plans to use server gateways that will front each region's systems to provide access to a view of data using Web services, Phillips said. The third and final phase of the project will add analytic applications to the system.

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