The Open Justice Broker (OJB) is a set of integrated justice information sharing components hosted within Apache Karaf and built upon the Apache integration stack.
In addition to specific justice information exchanges, the OJB supports:
The OJB leverages Apache CXF to support Web services exchanges that conform to the leading industry standards and the Global Reference Architecture (GRA) service interaction profiles. It also leverages the Apache Camel workflow and information flow engine to provide automation of business processes, as well as message transformation, routing, and validation.
The OJB codebase is organized into adapters, connectors, and intermediaries. These terms are defined by the Global Reference Architecture—the principal justice community standard for system interoperability. They are the building blocks of standards-based justice information exchange.
An exchange begins with a connector, which responds to some kind of trigger—for example, a user initiating a search from an application, or data becoming ready for transmission to partners—by forming a message and sending that message in a standards-conformant way to an intermediary. The intermediary receives the message from the connector and applies business rules to it; these rules determine what happens to the message within an overall business process. After applying the rules, the intermediary sends the message (perhaps after transforming it) to one or more adapters that interact with systems in receiving agency to either store or act on the information.
See a more detailed description of the connector-intermediary-adapter architecture, as described in SEARCH’s Technical Brief, “Using Open Source Infrastructure to Implement the Global Reference Architecture.”
Check out our FAQs page for answers to technical questions, for both prospective OJB member jurisdictions and vendors.
Learn more about how OJB technologies use industry-based standards and open source licensing.