SIFA's Boards Set Direction

Columbus, OH was the host city for SIFA's board retreat this year. I have a seat on the Technical Board since I'm the lead of the Data Model Task Force. This post is a summary of the major topics that were covered in the board retreat on November 14 and 15, 2007. Future posts will go into more detail on specific topics. The retreat kicked off on Wednesday, 11/14/2007 with a half-day joint session between the Technical Board and the Executive Board. Staff members presented status updates on various activities of the association.

SIF Association Activities

SIF 2 Certification

One of the major activities includes the forthcoming release of the SIF 2 test harness and certification program. Even though the SIF 2 Implementation Specification was released over a year ago, there have been several challenges surrounding the certification program. Most, if not all, of these challenges have been political versus technical in nature. There is always lag time between the release of a specification like SIF and the implementation of software in the field. However, the delays in the certification program, in my opinion, have definitely slowed down adoption of SIF 2.

National Data Model

Another major activity of the association is its involvement in the National Data Model. Vince Paredes, SIFA's data model architect, is the lead on this work from a SIFA perspective. We saw a preview of a more comprehensive presentation that Vince will deliver at the association-wide meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 2008. Quite a bit of new information was presented about this work, and I found it very interesting that the national data model is being defined using the Ontology Web Language (OWL). My hope would be that this will begin to lead SIF down the semantic road. According to Vince, the initial development of the national PK-12 data model is about 10% complete. He also made it clear that development will be a continual, evolutionary effort; it will likely never be “done.”

Internationalization

The internationalization of SIF was also a major topic. A significant amount of work has been done by SIFA and vendor members to localize the specification for use in other countries. BECTA in the United Kingdom is currently working through a set of pilot SIF implementations. Australia, I believe, is pre-pilot but very interested in using SIF. Other countries have expressed interest as well. The primary component of the SIF specification that must be adapted for international use is the data model. Since SIF was initially developed in the U.S., its data model was patterned on the processes and data in the U.S. educational system. Each country wanting to implement a local version of SIF will need to go through a process to design and implement a data model that fits its educational system. To facilitate this process, the creation of an Internationalization Task Force has been proposed.

Other Activities

Other association-level activities that were discussed include the SIFA/ADL partnership (see my earlier blog post on this), support of the state Longitudinal Data System grant recipients, and marketing and membership. All of these items were introduced during the first joint session between the boards. After lunch on Wednesday, the boards entered individual sessions. The tech board discussed several items but two topics took the bulk of the time.

Major Tech Board Topics

The first major topic that the tech board discussed was the 18 month timeline for specification releases. Decoupling the data model from the infrastructure, which is being driven by several business cases, including internationalization, was the second major topic.

18 Month Timeline

SIFA's current policy is to release new versions of the specification every 6 months. This rapid release cycle is critical to ensuring that SIF can quickly adapt to the needs of end-users. Achieving “out-of-the-box” interoperability and making SIF easier to implement continue to be the two major end-user oriented goals that drive evolution of the specification. Releases during this 18 month time frame will feature new data objects and infrastructure changes that will support achieving these goals. SIF Services will also be released within this window. Work group/task force leads will be planning and prioritizing tasks in further detail over the upcoming weeks and months.

De-Coupling

Since its inception, specification developers envisioned the possibility that SIF would one day need to implement new options for transport. Remember that the SIF specification was created prior to wide adoption of XML/RPC, SOAP and REST. SIF's current transport mechanism is XML over HTTP. However, the current structure of the SIF XSD contains “hard links” between the infrastructure and data model. Therefore, new data models cannot be “plugged” into the current infrastructure without some customization of the infrastructure. Initial investigation by the Infrastructure Work Group and Mark Reichert, SIFA's CTO, seem to indicate that formally de-coupling the data model from the infrastructure will not require a huge level of effort. It is also believed that this formal decoupling will have minimal impact for developers, and perhaps zero impact on end-users.

Volunteers Come Together to Help Schools

SIFA is a volunteer-driven association with a diverse set of member organizations. States, school districts, K-12 software companies, SIF software companies, and systems integrators are the major sub-groups in SIFA's constituency. I'm continually impressed how people from these diverse groups come together and harmonize their interests and knowledge within the specification development process.