Officials at the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) recently developed an online resource enabling government and industry representatives to share documentation on applications developed for specific types of information exchange.

The resource – called the Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) Clearinghouse – is available at http://it.ojp.gov/iepd and allows developers to post and share information exchange package descriptions.

According to the Justice Department’s Web site, an IEPD is defined as a “collection of artifacts that describe the structure and content of an Information Exchange Package.” Essentially an IEPD provides the model or baseline for particular business applications, such as sharing Amber Alert messages, incident reports, traffic citations and field interview reports.

Instead of an agency building an application specifically for a type of data exchange, it can use an IEPD that another agency developed as a baseline for building its own. This would enable agencies to deploy an application quicker and at reduced costs. It would also mean that a consistent model would be used for a particular application across multiple jurisdictions.

BJA funded the development of the clearinghouse in partnership with the nonprofit Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute. Initially the clearinghouse will provide metadata and links about IEPDs’ locations throughout various Web sites, but the intention is to develop a single repository.