My wife and I recently decided to dust off the old Lego sets and start building.  We had collected quite a few Star Wars Lego sets over the years but they were all dismantled with the pieces mixed together in a big Tupperware container.  What I always found fun about Lego’s is that for the basic sets you see a lot of the same pieces over and over and they get used in very clever ways.  Javelins from the Knight set become stabilizers for the wings of the Ewok Attack set.  Revolvers from the cowboy set are the same pistols used by space assassin Boba Fett.  There are very few custom pieces in any of the variety of branded Lego sets.

Lego has obviously made a conscious decision that it is just not sustainable to make all custom bricks for every set produced.

At the August LLF event I had the fortune to speak with a data architect with a very large financial company.  One of the first questions he asked me was if we had developed a canonical data model.  He also asked if our domain had a model we could use, which the justice domain does – NIEM.  This was a very interesting conversation that really clicked while snapping together Lego bricks.

Today I spoke with one of the architects who has done a lot of work on the NIEM data model, in particular LEXS which is a law enforcement specific subset.  I am currently working on an exchange with a victim notification service and have chose to use NIEM for the exchange.  This is a conscious effort on my part to use NIEM for external data sharing and a smaller model for our internal systems.  I also made a decision that rather than piecing together my own custom schema from NIEM that I would reuse an existing one and ended up choosing LEXS.  With some help from the aforementioned NIEM architect I was provided with a schema that expresses about 90% of what I need and left some open ends for me to fill in.

I now have all the pieces I need for the exchange and I just have to fill in a few pieces which I can build myself and still keep within the spirit of LEXS and save some time on schema development.

Now to help my wife find the last piece she needs.  Some times it can be hard to find the color you need but I’m sure we’ll find something in that box that will fit just right.

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