I had the pleasure of meeting with the ISE Program Manager (PM-ISE) Kshemendra Paul and DHS Executive Director for Information Sharing Donna Roy at a joint OMG-ISE-NIEM meeting in Washington DC this week. I attended as a part of a team led by OMG CEO Richard Soley looking at improving communications between government standards (represented by NIEM) and industry. Although NIEM is an “information model” associated with government data repositories and exchanges, it (and many of its use cases) are directly relevant to event processing – or rather, many of the use cases should be about event processing. Indeed the report on the NY Times on “How to Spot a Terrorist” looks like an event correlation use case straight out of David Luckham’s or Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte’s CEP books. Let’s hope US security isn’t just about running some SQL scripts across some databases on a regular basis…
It seems one of the challenges for NIEM is representing (and enforcing) data access policy rules in a standard way. And yet “policy decisions” are typically represented by “rules”, with their associated standards being for decision models (the in-startup-mode OMG DMN) and production rule interchange (the newly minted W3C RIF PRD). It will be interesting if government bodies becomes stakeholders in these standards. Meanwhile, I’m particularly struck by the similarities between some of these government requirements with the data access and filtering policy rules used in “Operational MDM”, and the real-time policies applied to things like telco services.
Clearly closer ties between the government departments and industry is going to be a good idea!
