OJB Technology

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:

• Federated query for people, vehicles, firearms, and incident information across diverse data sources (law enforcement, courts, corrections, and more)
• Subscription/notification (event alerting) capabilities
• Gateways to national services, such as N-DEx
• Automation of key justice workflows, such as incident reports, charge referrals and dispositions
• Privacy policy enforcement with Extensible Access Control Language (XACML)
• Federated Identity Management with SAML and GFIPM

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.

• Components developed on the Java platform, but the OJB interoperates well with .NET applications and services
• Specific Java technologies include:
  • Core Java runtime
  • Velocity
  • jQuery
  • Apache Camel
  • Apache CXF
  • Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi)
  • Apache Karaf
  • Spring
  • Pax Exam
  • and many other open source Java projects.
• Shibboleth for SAML / GFIPM support

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.