Data standards support a number of the information sharing goals identified by the President of the United States and our most senior leaders. Common data standards are an essential component of the technical infrastructure that enables the Intelligence Community (IC) and its national, state, local, tribal, and foreign partners to perform their missions more effectively.
A technical infrastructure operating on standards-compliant information offers our decision-makers, analysts, and war-fighters a greater ability to find and discover the information they need; link disparate pieces of information into a more meaningful whole; customize products optimized for particular audiences; and deliver those products in a secure, reliable, and timely fashion.
Intelligence Community Standards (ICSs) provide a conceptual foundation upon which physical file format implementations can be built and related. These implementations are defined in Implementation Profiles (IPs) specific to a particular file format encoding.