Florida law enforcement agencies participating in a 2-year-old information-sharing project will soon have access to a much larger world of data.

By December, the Florida Integrated Network for Data Exchange and Retrieval (FINDER) system, which 122 local police and sheriff's offices and some state agencies use, will comply with the Global Justice XML Data Model. Global JXDM is a national Extensible Markup Language standard specifically designed for exchanging criminal justice data.

Compliance will enable FINDER participants to share data with agencies in other states through a common language. Global JXDM includes a data dictionary, data model and common reference documents.

Michael Reynolds, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida (UCF) who helped develop the system, said the Florida Law Enforcement Data Sharing Consortium, which oversees FINDER, is negotiating with several law enforcement agencies in Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee about their participation in the system. He said several of those agencies will likely join before the end of the year.

Launched in 2003, FINDER enables investigators and officers to query databases from participating agencies to get leads on cases. The system includes only police records — not public records — on property, motor vehicles, people's names and descriptions, and pawnshop activity.

The system operates on a distributed architecture, meaning participating agencies own their data, said Lt. Mike McKinley of the Orange County, Fla., Sheriff's Department who is a member of the consortium's Steering Committee. He added that the consortium has implemented privacy policies throughout FINDER's development.

Users can find a report number, the type of crime committed, the date it occurred and the agency that provided the information, he said.

Each agency has a low-cost server that provides Web services. Agency officials determine what data elements they want to share, but most agencies share all of them. FINDER extracts data from agency records management systems and translates the information into its data model. FINDER stores the data on a Web server node, which is available to other agencies. The system compiles any query results into an easy-to-read report.

The system also provides a link-analysis function, which the university developed, to draw connections between known associates, property and other information about suspects and victims, McKinley said.