Des Vincent, the CIO of Northern Ireland, is the first speaker on the data exchange panel. I'm enjoying listening to him very much. He's discussing the COINS system that linked vehicle information from both public and private sources in NI. Not surprisingly, the politics was the most difficult part. He mentioned that there were over 200 databases in NI that contained names and addresses of citizens. I'm intrigued that, coincidentally, its almost exactly the same number as we founds in Utah.

Mark Blatchford, from the Social Security Administration, is presenting information about the eVital project and its predecessor pilot: EVVE. EVVE was a pilot project with eight states that provided SSA with an electronic way to match vital record data. Since SSA didn't want to be a repository of vital record data, all they got back from a request to a state was a green or red light. The project worked on XML and through a hub. One of the big challenges to this program was the financial aspect. States have become dependent on the revenue that is driven through the SSA requiring citizens to present a certified copy of their vital records when they talk to the SSA. Now that the SSA is going direct, they're not likely to pay the same amount for a data query that states could charge each citizen for getting a certified copy of their records.