IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The commission will focus on the standards process to get to an electronic drug record, although it will provide strategies and timelines for health IT interoperability in other uses, said commission director Dana Haza.

Tim Young, OMB's associate administrator for e-government and information technology, said at a conference in Falls Church, Va., Tuesday that the consolidation effort has strong support among agencies. He said that the question of whether agencies can share common processes associated with information technology security is meant to spark a dialogue in the IT security community.

The Homeland Security and Justice departments have unveiled plans to work jointly on a common computer language that could become a model for agencies to use to share information.

Dubbed the National Information Exchange Model, this Extensible Markup Language framework will use Justice’s Global Justice XML Data Model as its base.

"The relevancy ranking of our search engine couldn't really say, 'Here's a general thing about water quality that could get you started,' " said Richard Huffine, program manager for the EPA's National Library Network. So EPA officials modified the search engine.

Hart InterCivic, a leader in providing electronic voting technology to meet the national priority on election reform, has released a new public XML standard for exchange of critical information required to effectively manage elections, including cast vote data, election management data, and ballot definition data.

Hart InterCivic has titled the new standard Election Data eXchange (EDX), and is making it publicly available on the Hart website at http://www.hartintercivic.com/edx.html. EDX is the first open published election data standard for United States elections.

Beverly Godwin, director of citizen services and communications at the General Services Administration, seeks answers to that question. Should public Web sites include, for example, a search box on every page? Should all public sites include an employee directory?

GSA administrator Stephen Perry earlier this month said that OMB should perform a broad review of agency procurement to see if there is a need for consolidation.

Within two days, Leavitt said, he will select 17 members from federal and state government and from industry, including health care providers, insurers and IT vendors, to form the American Health Information Community.

NIST Special Publication 800-63 follows up guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget defining four levels of authentication assurance for federal IT systems.

Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s e-government and IT administrator, today said no matter what NIST decides, the adoption of these standards and how records are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration will be the initial measure of success.

Establishing a standard for biometrics on smart card credentials is one of the largest unresolved issues in implementing Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12, said Jeanette Thornton, a senior policy analyst at OMB. HSPD 12 is a program to create and issue standard computer-readable identity credentials that can be used governmentwide.