First XML-Markbook proposal

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

On Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 12:52:08PM -0500, Doug Loss wrote:

> I think this is an extremely important aspect of what we're talking
> about.  It seems to me as though XML is definitely the way to go.  I'll
> be mildly surprised if there aren't now (or won't be in the near future)
> XML to SQL (or pretty much any other database format) converters
> available.  With such, we could use virtually any backend data system
> while maintaining a wide variety of frontend user interfaces and input
> systems.

I have just contacted the leader of the SATML project to ask her if we can
consider her XML <-> RDB paper an open source document...  it looks very
relevant. (Remember, I posted a sample of their XML work earlier)

I also printed out and re-read the IMSproject's draft open source standard
for all things educational.  It looks to me to be essentially a highly
abstract, object oriented description of CORBAish "commands" and "meta" XML
schemas.  They really thought of a lot of future possibilities; for example,
assessment of MOO-based work (very clever), and make no assumptions about
the duration or type of any educational relationship; I was impressed...
this is truly in the spirit of what we have been saying here.

I know several of us have expressed unease with the style of the website
(using word7 documents), the formalness and grandiosity of the wording, and
the big commercial players involved.  But I remembered how Linus T. himself
took the commercial unix system as his model for Linux, how Gnome uses CORBA
which is an open source standard by a similarly grandiose organisation
omg.org, and so in the early hours of this morning, I decided to save oodles
of time, be humble and respond to Doug's call by proposing to use the IMG's
XML schemas:

The SATML project simply took a little bit of their huge work to create an
XML for test items... and I see how they did it; the meta schemas for XML
are one of the easiest things to read and understand in the whole document.
(pages 67-on for the brave)

So here goes:

For the markbook, here are the tags for "performance data" in IMSpeak:
(we would be designated "IMS-compliant" just by using these in our Markbook)

<perf:MathTest>
 <item>
  <content-identifier>  ex: MA12-Unit1 (unique test identifier) </content-identifier>
  <performance-coding>  ex: BC-LETTER-GRADE (some rating standard) </performance-coding>
      (meaning here: British Columbia Letter Grade designation) 
  <performance> C+ </performance>
  <issued-by> vernier@vc.bc.ca or SCHOOL-NAME </issued-by>
  
  the following are optional (I omitted the end tags):
  <begin-date-time> (using ISO8601 date format) 
  <end-date-time> 
  <received-by> 
  <certificate-identifier> 
 </item>
</perf:MathTest>
  
  
 I'm going to bed now, it is 2:15am.
 Bruno