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Xpress MetaCard DDMS Accelerator -
a Key to Information Sharing
Effective sharing of information is one of the most crucial Homeland Security goals. Once the appropriate infrastructure and dissemination channels are in place, success or failure will depend on the accuracy and consistency of metadata.

Executive Order 13356 of August 27, 2004, Strengthening the Sharing of Terrorism Information To Protect Americans, and the combined response to the Executive Order issued by the Director of Central Intelligence, make it clear that Metadata is an essential component to the Homeland Security strategy. The problem is that as difficult as it is to communicate effectively in writing, it can be even more difficult and tedious to ensure that documents are properly described with metadata. Perhaps someday there will be computer programs that can read a document and extract all of the key information accurately and create metadata automatically. For now, no computer program can match the author’s ability to describe and target content for effective sharing.

The answer is to make it easier for authors to add critical metadata, and that is exactly what the Xpress MetaCard DDMS Accelerator does. The Accelerator addresses the issue of Metadata compliance in two ways:

  • The Accelerator is preconfigured to be in compliance with the draft standards recommended by the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) combined response to Executive Order 13356, Section 3, items 3(a) and 3(b) directing the sharing of terrorism information.

  • The Accelerator provides a broad range of capabilities that are directly related to fulfillment of the requirements of information sharing. These include:

    • The ability to automate processing and cross-domain dissemination of tearlines; both on the desktop so that the author may preview the work, on the server for publishing, and with flexible collaborative tools that support internal and external coordination.
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    • Off-the-shelf support for EO 13388 Policy standards such as IC ISM, CAPCO, and IS MSP.

    • XML word processing in Microsoft Word with a normal user experience for the creation of intelligence.

    • Metadata automation, wizards, and interactive user support for the categorization and identification of data for sharing, discovery, and exchange.

    • Off-the-shelf MetaForms for user-friendly capture of IISS metadata security markings for Microsoft.

    • Office documents, whether created in XML or not.
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Metadata Output
Once a document is saved to the document library, its properties are automatically read from the MetaCard and inserted into the document library as a separate, related XML document. This allows XSLT transforms to be run against the metadata so that it can be displayed as HTML or converted to other formats. For example, here is MetaCard output for the DoD DDMS:
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An example of a document library with catalog information extracted from the MetaCard

Important Notice Concerning this Version of Xpress MetaCard for DDMS:

Xpress MetaCard has been configured to match the preliminary version of the DDMS, which has been made available by the DoD for piloting activities in coordination with Horizontal Fusion and other initiatives. Xpress MetaCard for DDMS may be used off-the-shelf with full compliance to the current DDMS version, and is "future proof" since the Xpress MetaCard Schema is easily changed and may be automatically version-verified and loaded from a central server. The reader is referred to an authoritative Department of Defense site for information on the current status of the DDMS specification.