SIF 3.0 -- THE Journal

SIF 3.0

By John K. Waters
08/01/09

It's not here yet, but it's on the way. And what it has in store-- full support for web services-- promises to throw open new avenues of data integration for school districts.

SIF 3.0 ONE OF THE EARLIEST ADOPTERS of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), Joe Kitchens, superintendent of Western Heights Public Schools in Oklahoma City, awaits the impending arrival of its newest adaptation. "I was there when 1.0 came out," he says, "and I'll be there when 3.0 is released."

Kitchens' zeal is well founded. Six years ago, he began employing SIF, a specification for data sharing among educational software applications, to link Western Heights' student information system to a handful of applications, allowing integration among the SIS and the district's nutrition, library, and gradebook programs. "We weren't trying to be pioneers," he says. "We were just trying not to get lost in our own data. We looked around and it just seemed to us that the SIF process was the most promising approach to bringing together all of our multiple data sources."

The district has continued to add applications in stages. Today that original handful has grown to 10 disparate software applications that can share information.

The interoperability of these applications has dramatically improved the quality of the district's data-- and saved it a ton of money. "For every dollar we've ever put into the SIF business, we've gotten three back in return," Kitchens says.

Now on the horizon is the approaching, though yet to be determined release date of SIF 3.0, the next major update to the specification. Western Heights is committed to adding software to its systems that is SIF compliant, and this new version (code name Columbus) is likely to give the district more vendors to choose from-- maybe a lot more-- because it will be arriving with a profound upgrade: full support for web services.

What's ZIS All About?

To appreciate what web services support means in the life of this evolving spec, you have to understand a couple of things about the architecture that makes it work.

First proposed in 1997, the SIF is an "implementation specification," or a kind of blueprint that describes how information can be exchanged among applications in a K-12 setting. The SIF architecture relies on a software server called a Zone Integration Server (ZIS) and message gateways called agents. Think of a ZIS as the data-integration broker among applications that support the SIF spec. It provides a channel for transport and for controlling access to data. SIF agents are pieces of code that reside within a software application, or next to it, and serve as extensions of it in interactions with each other via the ZIS. Agents move messages to and from the message queue and translate an application's native data model.

Like the SIF spec, web services use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to tag data, but where the SIF agents are tied to the ZIS architecture, web services use a more generalized set of standards to get different types of software to talk to each other over the internet without human intervention. Web services are components in software applications that allow other applications to access an app's data and capabilities over the internet. You could also think of web services as pieces of software that make themselves available to other software over the internet. What matters here is that these services also allow computer programs to share information, data, and services, and lots of software vendors use them.

By the time the World Wide Web Consortium, an international organization that develops standards for the web, had offered its first definition of web services, the term was already on the radar of the Schools Interoperability Framework Association, the group that developed and maintains the SIF specification and serves as the vendor certification authority. In fact, SIFA released a web services reporting specification in 2006, but virtually none of the educational software vendors used it. The organization expects a different response to the Columbus release because it will lock in the necessary web services extensions, effectively getting everyone on the same page.

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