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SIF Association - Overview
Terms of use
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Terms of use
These contents have been obtained from the SIF official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the SIF official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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SIF Association
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The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Association is a non-profit membership organization whose members include over 2200 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organizations active in primary and secondary (pK-12) markets. These organizations have come together to create a set of rules and definitions which enable software programs from different companies to share information. This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification. The SIF Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or district to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications. |
Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the SIF official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the SIF official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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| The goal of the SIF Association is to make it possible for school administrators, teachers and other school personnel to have access to the most current and accurate data available. |
Education Faces a Critical Challenge
Education is facing a critical challenge in deploying technology due to the challenges raised by a lack of interoperability. Frequently the applications available for primary and secondary (K-12) schools and their districts are either closed systems or systems that allow customer access only through proprietary interfaces and data formats. To a user, the lack of interoperability means: - Applications and their data are isolated from one another
- Redundant data entry is common
- Disconnected applications increase support costs
- Data reporting is costly and inefficient
- Data is inaccessible to decision makers and can be inaccurate
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| The lack of interoperability also creates difficult purchasing decisions for school, district and state technology coordinators who procure administrative and management applications. Many coordinators are experiencing an increase in technical support problems from maintaining numerous proprietary systems. Do they invest more money in their aging, installed-base systems? Or invest in newer, more efficient systems? The Schools Interoperability Framework Association addresses these issues. |
Meeting the Interoperability Challenge
Since 1997, education software companies, school district technology coordinators, and administrators have met to discuss ways to answer the interoperability challenge. Their solution: the Schools Interoperability Framework, a specification to: - Define standard formats for shared data e.g., student demographics information
- Define standard naming conventions for this shared data
- Define the rules of interaction among software applications
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How will SIF benefit your institution?
By using a standard set of specifications, education software companies would: - Ensure that data is entered only once in one application—and automatically propagates to other applications.
- Allow applications to exchange data more effectively.
- Allow educators to deliver reports securely to various organizations via the Internet.
- Ensure accurate data on which to base teaching and learning decisions.
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Terms of use
X
These contents have been obtained from the SIF official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the SIF official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
Print
SIF Implementation Specification
The SIF Implementation Specification is based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) endorsed Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is not linked to a specific operating system or platform. XML defines common data formats and rules of interaction and architecture.- Event Reporting is a Publish/Subscribe Model. Events are published/reported by each application and are received by other applications that have subscribed to them.
- DataProvision is a Request/Response Model. An application agent may register itself to the ZIS (Zone Information Server) as a provider of certain data objects. This allows the ZIS to satisfy a query request from an agent to locate the provider of a data object. The ZIS acts as the intermediary, forwarding the request to the agent, receiving the response, and then forwarding the response back to the original requester.
- Messages are securely encrypted using HTTPS. HTTPS is the most commonly used secure method of exchanging data among web browsers.
- Agents are authenticated by the ZIS before messages are passed.
- Message processing includes message validation and message identification. Guaranteed message delivery.
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