NIEM Canonical XML Dictionaries and Rule Engine Systems

Abstract

NIEM is the National Information Exchange Model strategy adopted in US government agencies to align their domain information exchanges. The aim is to provide government information exchanges that are consistent and interoperable by using the NIEM.gov approach that relies on repeatable and predictable patterns and techniques. This presents a range of challenges to implementers including mapping from domain vocabularies to NIEM and applying an appropriate rule validation framework. Also creating exchange schema structure definitions and generating testing data sample instances. How can rule engines assist in automating these processes? The methods NIEM advocates using have been criticized as being heavy-weight and cumbersome; how can rule-based techniques dramatically simplify the challenges that developers face in exploiting the NIEM-based approach?