N-DEx Adapter
If you are looking for a public safety software system with an N-DEx interface, Zuercher Suite is an excellent choice.
As you track local public safety data in your RMS, you are building a wealth of criminal justice information such as arrests, service calls, corrections data, warrants, and court data that may be useful far beyond your own jurisdiction. Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx interface enables your agency to take part in the growing information sharing movement with automatic submissions of criminal justice data directly from your RMS to the National Data Exchange system.
What is N-DEx?
The Law Enforcement National Data Exchange system, known as N-DEx, is a criminal justice information system operated by the FBI’s CJIS Division. Using their Law Enforcement Online (LEO) accounts, users can access N-DEx via a secure portal to leverage the system’s powerful searching and investigative tools, enabling them to:
- Detect relationships between people, places, things, and crime characteristics
- Link information across jurisdictions
- Connect the dots between apparently unrelated data
- Contact and collaborate with agencies that are working on cases of mutual interest
Participating local, state, tribal, and federal agencies can contribute data such as incident/case reports, incarceration data, and parole/probation data to the N-DEx system. N-DEx supports several manual submission mechanisms as well as a more automated batch submission process such as that used by Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx interface.
Benefits of Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx Interface
1. Compliance - Using the software's standard schemas and universal interface engine, each data element has been mapped to the appropriate matching field in the N-DEx schema. This mapping follows the N-DEx IEPDs and ensures that your submissions are compliant. Read more about compliance below.
2. Technical services assistance - Zuercher Technologies’ experienced technical services staff members have already performed much of the data integration process required for an agency to begin contributing data to N-DEx (mapping data, writing transformation code). They minimize the demands placed on agency IT personnel by assisting with remaining steps such as connecting to the N-DEx system, testing data, submitting initial legacy data, and setting up routine batch submissions.
3. Options for data submission - The software’s N-Dex interface offers many options for data submission, including batch submission using SFTP (secure file transfer protocol). Options are also available for the frequency of data submission, ranging from batches sent at the agency’s choosing, to batches submitted automatically at a specified frequency, to records submitted in basic real time (as often as once per minute). No matter which of these options you choose, Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx saves time and minimizes the potential for error by eliminating redundant data entry.
4. Extra level of data control - In the N-DEx system, each agency retains ownership of the records it submits. N-DEx provides a tagging tool allowing you to specify a degree of sharing for each record:
- GREEN – The record is visible to all users.
- YELLOW – A user performing a search that retrieves the record is unable to view it but is instead given contact information so your agency can grant access.
- RED – The record is only visible to users in sharing groups you specify; other users receive a “no results” message.
Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx interface capitalizes on system functions such as permission restricted case report types and record sealing to provide yet another level of data control: the ability to indicate that records handled as sensitive within your agency are automatically omitted entirely from your N-DEx submissions.
Is Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx Interface Compliant?
Yes. The interface complies with the N-DEx IEPDs, and because the IEPDs themselves conform to NIEM and LEXS standards, Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx interface is also NIEM-compliant and LEXS-compliant. Compliance with NIEM, LEXS, and N-DEx IEPD standards is assured using the Conformance Testing Assistance or “ConTesA” tool to validate the mapping of test data to the N-DEx system.
Zuercher Suite’s N-DEx interface is compliant with:
- NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) – Defines a set of building blocks used to create information exchange documents and transactions within and between the federal government and state, local, and tribal organizations.
- LEXS (Logical Entity eXchange Specification) – A specification designed to expand NIEM acceptance and use by defining a data model, syntax, semantics, and usage guidelines for information exchanges.
- N-DEx IEPDs (Information Exchange Packages Documentation) – An IEPD is a NIEM- and LEXS-compliant specification of the information content and structure for a data exchange. Two IEPDs have been created to provide submission standards for N-DEx: the N-DEx Incident-Arrest IEPD and the Incarceration/Booking/Probation/Parole IEPD.