Sypherlink NIEM Harmonizer Spoke, a component of the Sypherlink NIE Gateway, allows agencies to quickly and easily supply their critical data without modifying source systems.

NIEM Harmonizer Spoke provides the necessary software required for agencies to provide their data in multiple justice sharing formats. The application supports scheduling, auditing, and central web-based management to allow an agency or initiative sponsor to control the function of the software in a shared environment.

Since Sypherlink NIEM Harmonizer is driven from the data maps produced by Sypherlink Harvester, the design-time effort to discover and map a given data source is directly leveraged by the run-time component.

NIEM Harmonizer Spoke support two modes of operation that reflect the different ways data should be exposed in a given architectural environment.

• Warehouse mode – provides a NIEM-based method to get data out of a given data source; and
• Federated mode – provides a NIEM-based method to search an underlying data source.

Warehouse Mode

In a data warehouse scenario, Sypherlink NIEM Harmonizer Spoke is deployed to an end-point data source to produce LEXS Publish & Describe (LEXS-PD) XML messages. LEXS-PD is the protocol language used for submitting information to the Department of Homeland Security’s Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) and FBI’s National Data Exchange (N-DEx) programs.

The US Department of Justice designed LEXS-PD to be a standard mechanism for data extraction in feeding data into any central data warehouse – one of the reasons this standard is widely used by these national data sharing programs.

Sypherlink NIEM Harmonizer Spoke was designed to support all of the LEXS-PD data handling operations via sophisticated change data capture functions to insure data is propagated and managed over time.

When Sypherlink Harmonizer Spoke is used in conjunction with NIEM Harmonizer Hub, a complete data exchange warehouse architecture can be implemented.

Federated mode

Using NIEM Harmonizer Spoke in a federated mode, organizations can incorporate service-oriented-architecture (SOA)-based interface to invoke queries against a local data source based upon the LEXS-SR specification. The software takes these requests, formats them into the appropriate message type, brokers them to configured clients, and collates all of the results from responding systems for presentation to the originating application.