Riina Vuorikari: Why this new initiative, FIRE, a Federation of Internet Resources for Education? EUN has just completed successfully the CELEBRATE project where Learning Objects and their exchange was at the main focus.

David Massart: What we have achieved in Celebrate is a good model, EUN and the project partners have learned a lot during this project. However, what we completed in that project was a total system taking care of the whole value chain from content providers to end user. FIRE is part of our valorization effort of the CELEBRATE results taking into account the requirements of EUN's primary "customers", i.e. the Ministries of Education in Europe. This meant that we needed to turn the CELEBRATE results into some products that are easy to deploy and flexible enough in order to deal with different requirements.

Riina: Could you tell us more about learning resources' exchange and what is the Ministries of Education's (MoE) take on that? What kind of requirements do they have?

David: At the moment many Ministries of Education have collections of national web-based learning material for schools stored in repositories with metadata. Now they are passing to the next level; starting to share with others in order to capitalize on the re-use, as well as to take part in a European-wide initiative to share knowledge sources.

The idea of connecting a system such as a metadata repository and/or a search interface to a federation is still something that is rather new for MoEs, and it raises many issues, both technical as well as political. Since it is difficult to know a priori what is the best solution to these (technical) issues, some experiments on the level of trials and errors are needed.

What FIRE offers is an easy, flexible and cost-effective way to ask the right question, e.g., how do I share learning resources with others?, and what is the impact of sharing learning resources to my system?, and to look for the best answer based on the real needs.

Riina: Let's go into the details, what is FIRE about?

David: FIRE is a Federation of Internet Resources for Education. It allows the federation of repositories of descriptions of digital learning resources (i.e., metadata). FIRE is based on the Simple Query Interface (SQI), which is a standard API for querying heterogeneous learning resource repositories. The SQI was accepted by CEN/ISSS workshop on Learning Technologies last June and will become an official CEN/ISSS Workshop Agreement this autumn. The experience that EUN has gained from participating in that work has been very useful in designing FIRE.

Current implementations of SQI consist of peer-to-peer connections between repositories based on Web-services. In our opinion, this solution does not scale up very well. Moreover, very few MoEs are using any Web-services yet.

From a technical standpoint FIRE is a Java Message Service (JMS) implementation of a subset of SQI. The heart of the federation consists of asynchronous messaging services whose efficiency in supporting federated searches was demonstrated by CELEBRATE.

Actually FIRE has taken the best of both (SQI and Celebrate) and put them together. I think this is exactly something that MoEs are able to take up to experiment on interoperability between repositories of educational content.

Riina: So how easy or simple can it be?

David: We've taken extra care to design an easy set-up for the system. There is a Java library that has to be installed at the local repository, and then one is ready to play. This library is called SPARK (SPecial Application for Retrieving Knowledge) and it is used to connect systems to FIRE. It encapsulated all the messaging and search protocols behind a subset of the Simple Query Interface Interface.

A Java programmer is needed for about three days to a week's worth of work. Of course EUN will be able to give off-site help and support for installation. We also offer on-site help for installation

Riina: So once the Java library is installed the repository is ready to start experimenting and querying different repositories that are also part of the federation. What search protocols are used and most of all, what kind of metadata is needed?

David: The beauty of SQI is that any metadata in any format can be used, and the same goes for the query language. However, based on our wide user experience in CELEBRATE (about 500 schools used the system), we designed something called Simple School Query language (S2QL). The queries are limited to three kinds of criteria: keywords, age range (one can define the minimum and maximum), and language. We also recommend that the results are returned in strict LOM, as it is a standard and have a standard xml-binding. It is rather easy to export metadata to LOM.

This said, nothing limits the use of query language and result format. Any is permitted, which allows the creation of sub-communities of FIRE users.

Riina: Sounds like a pretty open and flexible system. Would Ministries of Education also be able to use it in a national context?

David: Absolutely! Any organization that has a need for sharing data (in our case LOM metadata) in a heterogeneous environment for instance involving publishers and other learning content providers - will gain great benefits from implementing FIRE. In addition our involvement in the latest developments concerning specifications is a guarantee for the future. Our involvement in the development of the SQI is one example, but we've been following the IMS Global Special Interest Group on Query services, and the S2QL, that is an abstract language, is definitely a result of that. As there is no assumption on the way that the data is stored in a repository, it is very easy to translate any S2QL query into your own repository's query language.

Riina: Can you let us know about what will happen next now that the FIRE has been ignited?

David: We are starting to work with the first group of people who have expressed interest already before the official launch. Among others, there are Catalonian department of Education, Makash from Israel, Norway opening Universities, Centre for Information Technology in Northern Sweden, and the French Community of Belgium.

The point is that FIRE will be absolutely open and for the moment for free (apart from own resources used for installing, of course) for all who wants to try experimenting interoperability at this level. So interested people should go to the FIRE-website for more information, for the download and documentation.

Riina: What about the continuity of this all?

David: FIRE is really about showing participants that there is a working solution: you can see interoperability working, instead of only talking about it.

FIRE will be fully integrated and compatible in the next generation of modular services that EUN will offer and whose developments should start in October in the framework of Calibrate, a new IST project. We are more and more going towards an approach providing modular services so that MoEs can choose what fits the best to their needs.

MoEs and others participating in FIRE will be able to join the new services at the first front when they are available. I'd like to mention that for example the issue of Digital Rights Management (DRM) will be dealt with in the future including licenses like Creative Commons, which is well suited for educational content.

Riina: Lastly, where can one find more information or any workshops available?

David: This effort is part of the LIFE project, which stands for Learning Interoperability Framework for Europe. A meeting geared for MoEs takes place in Florence on September 8-9. Interested people should look for information on the FIRE-site, and contact EUN for participating. There is no fee for the workshop. Other interested partners should simply contact us.

Riina: Thanks David! And watch out when playing with FIRE ;)

Links:
FIRE technical documentation: http://fire.eun.org
SQI: ftp://ftp.cenorm.be/PUBLIC/CWAs/draft/SQI_V1.0beta_2005_04_13.doc
CELEBRATE: http://celebrate.eun.org
LIFE: http://life.eun.org
Information on CEN/ISSS Workshop on Learning Technologies:
http://www.cen-ltso.net/
IMS Global SIG on Query Languages:
http://www.imsglobal.org/query/imsQueryServices.html
About David Massart:
http://www.europeanschoolnet.org/ww/en/pub/eun/about/contacts/dmassart.htm