IAC prepares its own data reference model

The Industry Advisory Council is about to release its own version of a data reference model for a federal enterprise architecture.

IAC's model will complement the one that the Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office is working on, said John Dodd, principal consultant for e-government solutions at Computer Sciences Corp.

Dodd spoke today at a breakfast meeting in Arlington, Va.

The council's data reference model will more fully explain how to implement frameworks via open standards than its federal counterpart, Dodd said. The council also believes that the data reference model should be constructed first rather than last.

FEAPMO officials are working on their draft data reference model, and no date has been set for its release.

About 65 companies are involved in IAC's year-old special interest group on enterprise architecture, Dodd said. The group's members are culling best practices from industry to recommend to the government.

Managing metadata is a core challenge in enterprise architecture, said Michael Lang, an executive vice president of MetaMatrix Inc. of New York. He demonstrated his company's MetaBase Modeler for mapping physical data sources to integrated virtual models of enterprise data.

The IAC, which is a subsidiary of the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils of Fairfax, Va., has released four of a planned 11 white papers on enterprise architecture.