The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF: http://www.sifinfo.org) is a US-based specification for coordinating the sharing of data among various IT systems in a school. It has been around for a while and has broad nominal industry support (Microsoft, Novell, Apple, etc), but seemed to be flagging until recent changes in US law (the "No Child Left Behind" act) made strict and detailed data reporting a much higher priority. Subsequently SIF has acquired stronger backing from the US federal government as well as a number of individual states. Currently there are a fairly small number of schools and districts that use the SIF system, to coordinate the sharing of data between their systems, but they exist, and the system actually works in production.
This recently released report from Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, http://www.egovmonitor.com/reports/rep12009.pdf states: "6.33 At its core,our approach relies on developing a UK version of the widely used School Interoperability Framework (SIF),customised to meet local needs and building on the significant work already done in relation to data standards via the DfES Information Management Strategy.It is therefore a 'best of breed'approach." Which makes SIF a more interesting prospect from an international perspective. For SchoolTool, SIF compatibility hasn't been a huge priority, in part because currently, only schools with an already built-out and well-planned infrastructure would have the Zone Integration Server that is required to coordinate the data sharing, or for that matter, other applications to share data with. However, looking at it from the larger Edubuntu perspective, more focus on SIF might make sense, since Edubuntu could itself include a preconfigured open source integration server and use it to coordinate data sharing between its constituent applications. Let me give you a somewhat SchoolTool-centric sketch of what this would look like: ST needs to keep track of the people in a school. Edubuntu also needs to keep track of that data for user accounts, etc., which I imagine you do or might in the future do in LDAP. Moodle also needs to know who is in the school. Eventually we want these three applications to share this data. Without SIF, we'll need specific components to make SchoolTool work with Moodle & LDAP, and they will probably end up being somewhat brittle and inflexible. Each additional app we interact with will require more custom code. If a Zone Integration Server is included in Edubuntu, each of these would just require a single SIF "agent" to be written that allows them to work with the server. That is a non-trivial, but well-defined technical problem. Once those agents were written, data sharing between all these applications would be flexible and reliable. Writing an open source Zone Integration Server or SIF agents for applications is not the kind of thing that people do spontaneously or for fun, so if this is going to happen, it will need to be funded from somewhere. Government funding for this kind of work is still pretty avant garde in the US, but is seems like a real possibility in the UK. --Tom -- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
