Riina: What kinds of organisations collaborate in SIF?

Tim: SIF is a non-profit organisation. It is comprised of :

• Software companies
• School districts
• State departments of education
• Regional service agencies
• Other educational organizations

Riina: What is SIF aiming at?

Tim: SIF is jointly developing an open specification for ensuring that K-12 instructional and administrative software applications share data quickly, dynamically and securely.

Riina: Do you especially work with certain platforms and applications?

Tim: SIF is a platform independent, vendor neutral technical blueprint for K-12 software that enables diverse applications to interact and share data: to interoperate. Examples of such applications are:

• Student information systems
• Food service
• Library systems
• Transportation systems
• Learning content management systems (LCMS)
• Data warehousing systems among others.

Riina: How is the work organised?

Tim: SIF is comprised of working groups of educational vendors and customers and is focused solely on the interoperability of educational software. SIF members are jointly building a specification containing a set of rules and definitions which are leverage existing standards and specifications such as XML, HTTPS and IMS.

Riina: Do you develop specifications?

Tim: Yes, the SIF specification has the following goals:

• Define standard formats for shared data (e.g., student demographic information) 
• Define standard naming conventions for this shared data
• Define the rules of interaction to transport this data among software applications

Riina: I once heard you talking about horizontal and vertical interoperability. Could you explain that a bit?

Tim: The SIF Specification enables data to move among software applications to support both 'horizontal interoperability' within schools and districts, and 'vertical interoperability' between school/districts and state/provincial/national departments of education.

Horizontal interoperability allows school administrators and educators to streamline data management and create a true 'information management system.' For the first time bringing together all of their disparate data repositories through a platform-independent, vendor-neutral communications architecture based on open standards.

Vertical interoperability allows schools and districts to use the move same data to state/provincial and national departments of education that they use for local administration.   This both reduces the reporting burden on schools and improves the data quality and accessibility of the data available to provincial/national departments.  SIF is working together with US state and federal education departments to support vertical interoperability in support of the recently enacted US federal education legislation.

Riina: On your website you have a catch phrase "Does Your Software Play Well With Other?", what is that about?

Tim: SIF has also established a Compliance Program in which a neutral third party certifies software applications as 'SIF Compliant'.  The SIF Compliant certification mark ensures that the software has been certified to conform to the SIF Specification.  Customers can have confidence that certified applications will work together in a SIF implementation.

Riina: Do you see that having any benefit for us here in Europe?

Tim: SIF believes that the Framework's Compliance Program as well as its support for both horizontal and vertical interoperability has great value for the European education community.  SIF has begun a dialog with a number of representatives of this community to explore the extent to which SIF can support European needs, and would like to continue to expand this conversation.

Riina: Thanks. Where can people find more information about SIF?

Tim: For more information about SIF please visit  http://www.sifinfo.org
or contact me at tmagner@siia.net.

Riina: One more thing, what is International K12-Schools Interoperability Forum?

Tim: This forum is dedicated to supporting an international dialog around the data and interoperability needs of K12-Schools.  It is coordinated by the SIF. This forum area includes a listserv, FAQ, and discussion forum dedicated to issues related to bi-lateral and multi-lateral K12-Schools projects and topics or documents released for public comment and discussion by the group.Anyone interested can take a look and join at http://www.imsglobal.org/developers/sif/.

Current European Actions:

Research on School Information Systems
http://www.eun.org/goto.cfm?did=20429

 Schools keep large archives of administrative data about teachers, pupils, school buses, books – and all aspects of school life. What kind of data does your school collect, and how do you store it? The Open Architecture and Schools in Society survey is finding out just that.

CEN/ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop
http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/lt/

Interoperability frameworks for exchange of information between diverse management systems*

CEN/ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop has established a new project team aiming to provide interoperability specifications for a range of information exchange, initially aimed at school systems but a so applicable in a wider lifelong  earning context. This work item will support the outputs of the OASIS (Open Architecture and Schools in Society) project that enable different applications and systems to share information. http://oasis.cnice.mecd.es 
 
The work of OASIS will initially be based upon the SIF project but will be adapted by the partners to meet European needs. Some of the original specifications will be discarded and some additional ones will be created.  The work item will focus on collaborating with the OASIS partners in ensuring that the specifications they produce do not duplicate international  standards activity, are appropriate for a broader audience and are suitable for e-Europe standardization. 

* Extract from Learning Technology eBrochure - Fifth issue http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/lt/ebrochure/ebrochure-number5.pdf