Re: project updates again: EduML - XML

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

Hello!

My main project is the creation of a Educational Data Standard called EduML 
which is XML.  I started in Nov 98 and with the help of a half dozen members 
of this list managed to post a description of the EDUML standard.

http://cran.seul.org/~vernier/eduml

It is somewhat encyclopedic in order to make room for everything that one 
might encounter as school data: library databases, demographic databases, 
markbook data, educational outcome data, internationalisation etc...

The beauty of XML is that we can keep adding more (sub-)elements and attributes
as we find the need.  None of the elements are mandatory and we can keep 
adding as often and as much as we want.  I try to keep the whole thing elegant 
(my mathematician side) by minimizing redundancy and favoring simplicity 
(which ironically takes more effort than allowing complexity to flourish).

The EduML standard is available via cvs (though there are currently no 
co-maintainers).  Odile Benassy (on this list) is leading a huge effort to 
promote EduML among educators and administrators (at the ministry level) in 
France.  Merci, Odile.

A few developers on this list have mentioned looking into using XML (and 
sometimes specifically EduML) as data format for their programs. I have read 
that putting the smarts into the data rather than in the programs is the way 
of the future (and that is possible with XML).

Still to do: writing a DTD for EduML (this is a nice finishing touch) and more 
importantly to get more feedback to see if all educational data in your niches 
can be converted into EduML.

Finally, I'd like to have a working model (and what better than the real life 
situation I am in as an educator) of EduML working with proprietary and open 
source software to provide a big picture of where a student is at.  I am 
writing this in PHP and the newly discovered XMLscript (see earlier posting)

I will post this work with fake data later on this summer. (unless there is 
immediate interest)

If anyone wants me to write a tutorial about the combined use of PHP and 
XMLscript to extract and display EduML data, let me know. I sure spent a lot of 
time figuring it out (it is a new field and the documentation is so cryptic).
I know equivalent methods exist in the other living languages (PERL, Python, 
Java etc...) ... I just happen to have chosen PHP/XMLscript for this 
implementation, this summer.

Bruno