[seul-edu] Re: SIF Specification v1.0

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

On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 03:08:14PM -0500, Doug Loss wrote:

> > http://www.schoolsinterop.org/specification.asp
> > 
> > SIF is an interoperability standard for K-12 instructional and
> > administrative environments.

SIF covers the same ground as EDUML, but has the Microsoft Marketing Machine
behind it.  For that reason, we cannot ignore it:  if it is successful in
convincing commercial education software publishers and school decision
makers, SIF will become the standard way to interchange data.

My comments: (+pros and -cons)

- SIF proclaims to aim ONLY at the North American education scene, but allows
its specs to be used by other world regions :-)

+ the website contains a good description of the problem of data apartheid

+ SIF is based on XML: "The SIF is not a product, but an industry initiative 
to develop a technical blueprint for K-12 software that will enable diverse 
applications to interact and share data now and in the future."

+ one SIF goal: "facilitate data sharing without incurring expensive
customer development costs"

- "No company may claim to be SIF compliant until compliance criteria has
been created and their product has been Tested for compliance." 

- A company's involvement (no mention of individuals or orgs)
is categorized as either "SIF Participant" starting at $750/yr and going up
according to gross sales, or "SIF Endorser" who is only allowed to comment
on SIF (at no cost to them :-) or "SIF Compliant" who has passed the above
mentioned test (for which no price is suggested but one can be imagined :-)

+ All SIF XML communication must be done over https 

+ SIF v1.0 contains a much wider selection of tag elements than this summer
including many things not currently in EDUML such as purchasing, cafeteria, 
and school buses 


Summary:  SIF is being seriously worked on by many commercial companies.
Because it is essentially XML, I welcome it.  Because it is being developed
in a closed (club-members only) manner, we can't influence nor contribute to
it:  At most, we can make our software SIF-aware  (we cannot freely use the 
term SIF-compliant).  Thanks to XML, we can easily do SIF to/from EDUML
conversions should we choose to develop EDUML-compliant software instead.

Bruno