Florida Begins Linking Its Law Enforcement Agencies
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement will start work in February on a $15 million project to incorporate the back-end systems of 500 law enforcement groups throughout the state.
In the initial stage of the Florida Law Enforcement Exchange (Flex) project, information stored in the records management systems of area and state police, corrections, and court departments will be cataloged and a metadata management layer will be established, according to state officials.
In numerous cases, Florida law enforcement investigators currently obtain information from other departments in the state through phone or email. The Flex system vows to offer access to Florida law enforcement information with one query, according to state CIO Brenda Owens.
The new system will employ the Federal Global Justice XML Data Model, an information-sharing standard created by the U.S. Department of Justice, to offer data translation for data sharing, says Flex project technical coordinator Mike Phillips.
Besides utilizing the XML Data Model standard, IT developers must lift information definitions from every regional system to establish a common statewide vocabulary for information exchanges, he adds.
Florida officials are currently completing the instruction of users on Flex’s automated data-mapping system and have gathered a dictionary of elementary data elements within the regions.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Computerworld (02/13/06); Havenstein, Heather .