Florida eyes $15M data integration plan for agencies

06.02.2006
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement this month will begin a US$15 million, year-long 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 now must 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.