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Terrorism feeds on fear and disorganization. In today’s world, small groups of organized terrorists can weave through a powerful nation’s defenses and cause havoc, as we have seen recently. Terrorism counts on being able to attack disconnected points in a system so that it cannot be traced. If our government is able to gather assorted data in an integrated fashion, it can counter future terrorist activity more effectively. For example, an invaluable tool for counter-terrorism would be an integrated government database that maintains suspicious profile information from a combination of government agency sources such as FBI watch-list profiles, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) criminal activity, NIA (National Immigration Agency) overstayed visa information, CIA public threat warnings, NSA (National Security Agency) suspicious activities, as well as other government and commercial enterprises involved in possible terrorist activity.

Is it possible to create such as database? Can government agencies (and appropriate commercial enterprises such as airlines) share such sensitive information in a collaborative fashion? If government agencies collaboratively created national profiles of people, would the public be outraged over the government having “Big Brother” profiles of people? Does national profiling raise other security issues such as creating potential gold mines of information for technology thieves? Could complete profiles of people be misused and misinterpreted? What parties should be included in a national profiling system? If it is only parties who have had suspicious activities that are linked to possible government threats, how do we define the business rules to identify who should be included within such an integrated information system?

Taking into account the above questions, many would argue that it is unwise to move toward an integrated national profiling system. My perspective is that we, as a nation, are duty bound to serve in the most effective manner possible, and only with integrated information can we make effective decisions. To say that it is too dangerous to have integrated information on people and organizations is to say that we, as a nation, cannot trust our government with valuable information and that our disparate database silos protect us from our own inadequacies of safeguarding and wisely using that information.

In order to create integrated national profile information, a data model is needed that defines the appropriate and required information about people and organizations and how that data is interrelated. This data model could provide a common understanding of the data and provide a standard structure for maintaining and sharing data. While there are many data model notations (including object data models and several notations for entity-relationship diagrams), the most important point is that we adhere to standard data structures that a common data model could suggest. If our nation could agree upon standard designs for maintaining common constructs, it would become easier to share and integrate information.

How is it possible to build a common national data model when government agencies (and commercial enterprises) often have widely varied information needs? For example, the DEA maintains information such as drug listings, drug offenders, drug traffic laws, and drug incidents and crimes. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) maintains information such as prospective and past immigrants, applications for immigration, visa statuses, visa violations and immigration laws. Since these agencies maintain such different types of information, does it still make sense for them to share information?

While the specific types of information varies dramatically, there are general types of information that can be shared among agencies to provide dramatic results in helping the government effectively serve and protect. Government agencies maintain a great deal of common information such as information on people, organizations, relationships, contact information, communications between people, transactions, licenses, applications, laws, programs, work effort management, government budgeting and government accounting.

Figure 1 provides a possible structure that could serve as the basis for common national database integration. This universal data model is certainly not the only way to represent this common data, and there are many other variations that could be used as a standard. The purpose of this column is to illustrate that it is possible to create a common vision for integrating national data. The important point is to form agreement on terminology and data structures between various government and commercial enterprises so that data may be shared more easily.