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Blog: David Loshin

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Federal Enterprise Architecture, Data, and Metadata

Occasionally, I attend meetings on behalf of one of my government clients. Today I was at one with a set of mixed topics, although the typical agendas focus on metadata. The usual meeting attendees are individuals involved in deploying metadata registries based on the ISO/IEC 11179 standard on Metadata Registries, but today's meeting featured a presentation by Mike Daconta, who is spearheading the effort to refine the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Data Reference Model.

What is interesting about the FEA DRM, as it is called, is that it is the last piece of the Federal Enterprise Architecture to b eput in place. Confused that an enterprise architecture can be defined without focusing on data first? Join the crowd...

In fact, only recently had there been any real movement in the Data Reference Model arena, and what had been released was an XML model intended to represent a way to register data sets for the purposes of data exchange. Now, considering that Mr. Daconta comes from the Department of Homeland Security, it is not surprising that the desire to effectively share information among government agencies is helping to drive the effort forward. One consideration, though, is that the rest of the FEA focuses more on assessing and documenting government investment in technology infrastructure and how that infrastructure is put to use to improve the way Federal agencies manage their IT investments. Because of this, my perception is that there is a bit of a disconnect between the rest of the FEA and the Data Reference Model part of it.

Luckily, our friends from the Federal Data Registry Users Group are pretty smart, and were able to direct some good questions to those defining the DRM, and Mike Daconta spent some time today addressing some of those questions. The conclusion was very inspiring, in that there may be a good opportunity to inject some good ideas and guidance into the use and value of metadata into a process that affects most, if not all, agencies in the Federal Government.

For more information on the continuing saga of the FEA DRM, see the project's Wiki.

  Posted by David Loshin on August 9, 2005 7:22 PM |

Comments

Agreed that the FEA PMO could have prioritized and got the DRM out earlier, and not kept it as the last effort. But, that is not to say that the federal agencies are not focusing on the Data Architecture at all, in their EA. Just that, it will be a little bit less inconsistent.

A question for you, on a different note -> I am new to FEAF. I noticed that FEAF is moving away from
- mapping Data and Business
to
- mapping Data and Services / Applications which in turn maps to the business.

I always wondered if it makes sense to have both the mappings, albeit at different levels. Maybe, the logical, high level view (called as the Information model, if you may) to the business and the little more detailed close-to-physical model (called as the Data model, if you may) to the applications / services.

And the physical model at the enterprise level, being limited to the data that is being shared / exchanged with other services / applications. The point being, you're not moving the application Data Architecture to the EA level.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Posted by: Thanigai | April 25, 2006 6:34 AM

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