The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Geospatial Management Office
(GMO) developed the DHS geospatial data model (GDM) to support
geospatial interoperability and information sharing. Geospatial
operations at the DHS will be based on the model, as will data
exchanges with allies in the homeland security and disaster management
community. The development of the model began in 2005 by the GMO
to provide an open, standards-based model for use by the homeland
security community. The initial design, and subsequent revisions,
have incorporated existing, openly-accessible Federal and industry
standards and practices. Version 2.7 now incorporates the
fire/hazmat data model developed in partnership with the National
Association of State Fire Marshals and the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs, a
member organization of both the National Fire Protection Association
(NFPA) and the International Association Fire Chiefs (IAFC). In
addition, the GDM has been updated with the latest version of HSIP Gold
(Version 2008) as well as the Infrastructure Taxonomy (Version
3.0).
The GDM is a comprehensive framework for organizing features of
interest to the homeland security community. The essential purpose of
the GDM is to provide a means for sharing of geospatial information
sharing between organizations and agencies whose primary responsibility
it is to plan for, and respond to natural disasters and hostile events.
Implementation (or physical) models based on this logical construct
will be used by various mission owners within DHS and its allies across
the homeland security community as they discover, collect, store, and
share geospatial data. A key outcome of the GDM is a common operating
picture that is shared between organizations responding to events of
national significance.
The GDM is continually growing and improving to better suit the
Homeland Security community. Feedback from the field is
incorporated into each subsequent release and “tools” are being
developed to help users implement the DHS GDM. The model will
also form the core standard for the Department’s emerging
services-based geospatial infrastructure, and will serve as an extract,
transform, and load (ETL) template for content aggregation. The
model is constructed as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) class
diagram, and is available in a number of formats for download and
review.
Comments?
As in previous versions, the FGDC Homeland Security Working Group
and the GMO are extremely interested in soliciting user feedback about
the models and ways to make it more accessible by all users.
Please download the DHS Geospatial Data Model Comment
Resolution Matrix VERSION 2.7 [Excel] and add your comments.
Forward your completed matrices as an email to hswg-review@fgdc.gov.
Comments will be adjudicated through the FGDC Homeland Security Working
Group-Content Subgroup, and the results reposted to this website.
Previous Versions
Development of the GDM, was subdivided into three major phases.
Version 1.1, created in the first phase brought together components
from existing models and aligned them to ensure that they were all in a
consistent modeling notation and style and were ready for the next
phase. During Phase II, the “content” phase, the model components were
internally and externally harmonized with the user community. The Phase
I model elements that do not survive the harmonization, or that change
drastically during Phase II, were retained as “legacy adapters” in the
resultant version 1.2 and deprecated in version 2.0 or future
releases.
For links to further information on previous models, downloads and user
feedback, click on one of the following links:
Schema Generation Tool 
The DHS Geospatial Management Office has deployed an online schema generation tool to extract custom views of the GDM. ESRI users can now export custom ArcXML schemas and use ArcCatalog to produce GIS-ready geodatabases.