SIF in Edubuntu

[Tom Hoffman]

The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF: http://www.sifinfo.org)
is a US-based specification for coordinating the sharing of data among
various IT systems in a school.  It has been around for a while and
has broad nominal industry support (Microsoft, Novell, Apple, etc),
but seemed to be flagging until recent changes in US law (the "No
Child Left Behind" act) made strict and detailed data reporting a much
higher priority.  Subsequently SIF has acquired stronger backing from
the US federal government as well as a number of individual states. 
Currently there are a fairly small number of schools and districts
that use the SIF system, to coordinate the sharing of data between
their systems, but they exist, and the system actually works in
production.

This recently released report from Becta, the British Educational
Communications and Technology Agency,
http://www.egovmonitor.com/reports/rep12009.pdf states:

"6.33 At its core,our approach relies on developing a UK version of
the widely used School
Interoperability Framework (SIF),customised to meet local needs and
building on the
significant work already done in relation to data standards via the
DfES Information
Management Strategy.It is therefore a 'best of breed'approach."

Which makes SIF a more interesting prospect from an international perspective.

For SchoolTool, SIF compatibility hasn't been a huge priority, in part
because currently, only schools with an already built-out and
well-planned infrastructure would have the Zone Integration Server
that is required to coordinate the data sharing, or for that matter,
other applications to share data with.

However, looking at it from the larger Edubuntu perspective, more
focus on SIF might make sense, since Edubuntu could itself include a
preconfigured open source integration server and use it to coordinate
data sharing between its constituent applications.  Let me give you a
somewhat SchoolTool-centric sketch of what this would look like:

ST needs to keep track of the people in a school.  Edubuntu also needs
to keep track of that data for user accounts, etc., which I imagine
you do or might in the future do in LDAP.  Moodle also needs to know
who is in the school.  Eventually we want these three applications to
share this data.  Without SIF, we'll need specific components to make
SchoolTool work with Moodle & LDAP, and they will probably end up
being somewhat brittle and inflexible.  Each additional app we
interact with will require more custom code.  If a Zone Integration
Server is included in Edubuntu, each of these would just require a
single SIF "agent" to be written that allows them to work with the
server.  That is a non-trivial, but well-defined technical problem. 
Once those agents were written, data sharing between all these
applications would be flexible and reliable.

Writing an open source Zone Integration Server or SIF agents for
applications is not the kind of thing that people do spontaneously or
for fun, so if this is going to happen, it will need to be funded from
somewhere.  Government funding for this kind of work is still pretty
avant garde in the US, but is seems like a real possibility in the UK.

--Tom