Abstract

Advances in digital technology have improved educator access to information about their particular discipline. Homeland security is such a new discipline, however, that it does not have a large body of organized, domain-specific, public digital material. Consequently, educators and students will have to rely on resources from other specialties until the homeland security discipline matures enough to develop adequate discipline-specific, publically available digital sources. Fortunately, information from other domains can have a great deal of relevance. Unfortunately, the material is often not represented in a manner that reflects a relation to homeland security — which makes it a challenge to search and retrieve. The development of standards to represent homeland security data regardless of where it is stored can improve the ability to access digital materials, irrespective of discipline, that complement homeland security education and training programs. One near term solution is to develop a metadata standard that incorporates homeland security specific business metadata, which will allow the accurate description of any relevant digital artifact regardless of where it resides.

Author