Chief Information Officer

IC Technical Specifications

Intelligence Publications

Data Encoding Specification for Intelligence Publications

Overview

This IC enterprise data encoding specification defines XML elements and attributes, associated structures and relationships, mandatory and cardinality requirements, permissible values, and constraint rules for representing electronic textual information resources. Textual information resources consist primarily of text supplemented by interspersed non-textual information. Examples include assessments, studies, estimates, compilations, reports, and other document-oriented information.

This specification contains tagging structures for information resource metadata, mixed textual and media content found in the body of publications, source reference citations, classification and control markings, and knowledge assertions. Compliance with this specification is measured against all aspects of the technical and documentary artifacts contained within the specification release package.

This specification changed names and numeric designators multiple times since its inception in the late 1990's.

This specification is maintained by the IC Chief Information Officer via the Data Coordination Activity (DCA) and Common Metadata Standards Tiger Team (CMSTT).

Technical Specification Downloads

Latest Approved Public Release:

Mission Requirements

This specification is designed to fulfill a number of requirements in support of the transformational efforts of the Intelligence Community. Many of these requirements are articulated in IC Directives 203, 206, 208, 501, and 710, among others. Features of this specification are provided to support:

Improving publication and dissemination efficiency by reducing the cost and time for performing manual and complex rendering, manipulation, and content transformation.
Facilitating discovery and exchange of intelligence publications between collectors, all-source analysts, and consumers.
Capturing overall security marking metadata in order to support attribute-and clearance-based information management practices, such as: secure collaboration, content management, content and portion-level filtering of discovery results, and content transfers across security domains.
Capturing source reference citations to provide intelligence producers the ability to systematically analyze how and at what frequency the data they gather or produce is being used.
Capturing and retaining a greater understanding of an intelligence publications meaning, purpose, genesis, and characteristics as identified by a human or service.