XAware has announced its solution is a component in a public safety information sharing program operated by the State of New Mexico’s Justice Information Sharing Council (JISC) under the New Mexico Sentencing Commission. XAware’s data integration capabilities enable New Mexico to operate an innovative system for accessing and sharing information from criminal agencies in a way that is secure, efficient and cost-effective.

New Mexico’s Consolidated Offender Query (COQ) program is a statewide multi-agency effort to facilitate the sharing of key justice information. Corrections and court data are routinely shared by a variety of organizations, including police departments, district attorneys, sheriffs and tribal public safety groups, as well as federal authorities such as Homeland Security and the FBI. Additionally, Human Services agencies often need access to this data. New Mexico wanted to consolidate data from disparate state justice systems into a single user query response. Previously, justice workers had to access records one agency at a time.

As is the case in most states, each agency in New Mexico has its own source databases and a data warehouse for storing information. It would be prohibitively expensive, as well as time-consuming, to change all internal systems so that everyone is using the same approach or converted to NIEM Standard mandated by federal grant. New Mexico’s federated system provides a cost-effective alternative – and open source solutions such as XAware help to drive down operational costs. In fact, New Mexico’s federated system could be saving approximately $1 million a year compared to index-based information sharing systems, which require much greater investments in equipment and maintenance.

In addition to cost benefits, New Mexico’s federated system is also more accurate than index systems. While federated systems provide nearly real-time access to a comprehensive set of data, index systems require the user to send information to a central data warehouse. The system then checks to see where the information resides and eventually connects to the sources. Also, the responsibility for maintaining data integrity in a federated system remains with the individual agencies, which means that the information is more likely to be timely and accurate. 

Composite data services built with XAware provide real-time access to information and the ability to abstract, transform, aggregate and mashup data. XAware 5.2 is available for free use under the GPLv2 license and via a commercial license. Services and support subscriptions are also available for purchase from XAware, Inc.

For more information and to download XAware 5.2, please visit: www.xaware.com.