Chief Information Officer

IC Technical Specifications

The successes of our intelligence, defense, homeland security, and law enforcement missions are critically dependent on information producers and consumers being able to share, manage, discover, retrieve, and access information across national and international boundaries.

To automate the enterprise, data, service, network, and information assurance architecture and engineering efforts must come together in response to defined mission and business requirements. The enterprise data specifications below are the result of IC collaboration and coordination in response to public law, executive orders, DNI policy and guidance, and change requests submitted by IC elements.

Data Encoding Specifications

The following data encoding specifications define agreed upon digital encodings or formats for information being shared or exchanged within the enterprise. These specifications are optimized for consistent and efficient processing within software, systems, or service applications.

These specifications should be viewed as component modules. Many of the specifications are tightly integrated and dependent on each other. They can be integrated into other data encoding specifications or profiled (i.e., configured or constrained) to achieve a particular mission or business objective. They may also serve in a standalone role as an encodings for exchange payloads within a web services environment.

Each version of an IC enterprise data encoding specification is individually registered in the IC Enterprise Standards Baseline (implemented via the IC Standards Registry (ICSR)). The registry citations address the prescriptive status and validity period for each new version. Data Encoding Specifications exist for the following types of data:

Service Specifications

We are very interested in hearing your views on issues of importance to you. We encourage you to contact us with any questions, comments, and concerns of interest to the Intelligence Community Data Coordination Activity (Data Activity). Someone from the Data Activity staff will respond to your email.

As always, we thank you for your time and continued collaboration through the Data Activity.