Re: [school-discuss] Eduml Dream

[vernier@vc.bc.ca (Bruno Vernier)]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 09:05:00AM -0500, Michael Williams wrote:

> Is it possible to provide an "agent" between SIF and IMS so that
> SIF would in effect become something of a subset of IMS?

Quoting IMS http://www.imsproject.org/profiles/lipbest01a.html#2.2.2 :

"SIF is focused on supporting interoperability between schools-based
educational administration systems whereas IMS/LIP is focussed on learner
educational information."


Quoting MLS Managed Learning System 
quoting from http://xml.coverpages.org/MLS-Desc200105.html:

"SIF (Schools Interoperability Project) and IMS (A worldwide effort to
standardize elements of content) are two primary standards playing a role in
the Managed Learning System Specification 1.0. SOAP and XML also play a role
in terms of how information is exchanged by disparate systems over the
Internet. Version 2.0 of the Managed Learning System is a two-year effort to
define and validate how these and other standards work together to fulfill
the promise of the Managed Learning System."


and from Singapore, a paper describing an attempt to consolidate various
norms into a standard:

http://www.itsc.org.sg/doc/abstracts/abstract_ss-el_1.html

it is a composite of components from IMS mostly (and its fellow travellers
SCORM (US Military Education) and AICC (Aviation Education) as well as one
mention of SIF


Finally: here is nice list of organizations working in the field of Standardisation of
Learning Technologies: http://www.prometeus.org/1links.htm

from that list, I observe the vast majority are linked directly to IMS (part
of what I call the IMS family) and one to SIF.


My Rough Conclusion:
-------------------

We must react to IMS which is by far the dominant player in education
software standards.  In theory, since both SIF and IMS are XML Schemas,
interchanging should be a simple XSLT exercise.  I have observed over time that
many of the commercial software companies whose products I have no choice
but to work with have  announced some claim to being IMS compliant in the
future ... I have not seen too much mention of SIF.

Bruno