Data interoperability in Edubuntu

[Tom Hoffman]

Hi all,

I'm going to send this out as an email prior to writing a spec on
LaunchPad, because I'm not sure if this is outside of the scope of
what can reasonably be considered as part of the core Edubuntu
process, but it is important, and if nothing else some consciousness
raising is necessary.

We're getting to the point where there are some serious chunks of free
infrastructure for schools, such as Moodle, LAMS, Elgg, Edubuntu
itself, and SchoolTool in edgy will have a ton of new functionality.
As I talk to people implementing these in their schools, or for that
matter, writing this software, the possibility of getting these pieces
to work as one integrated system is increasingly the central topic.

Things are starting to happen piecemeal.  The new versions of Moodle
and Elgg can pass student generated content between them, Moodle
supports importing class rosters using the IMS Enterprise spec,
SchoolTool has always had its own web services API (that connects to
nothing at this point), and of course there is a huge raft of
elearning specs that allow course content to be imported and exported
from various authoring tools and LMS's.

There is an existing spec, the Schools Interoperability Framework
http://sifinfo.org , which is used in the US to tie together a school
or district's enterprise apps and could be used to focus
interoperability of free software as well.  SIF is basically an XML
web services architecture and data model covering many facets of
school data & administration.  It is sort of like D-Bus for a school.
One real hinderance to adoption of SIF by open source developers is
that the architecture is dependent on a central server called a Zone
Integration Server (ZIS), and the only free implementation is both out
of date and incomplete (after being developed and dropped by Sun.
More on that here: http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2006/06/001423.php).

A Linux distribution that included a working ZIS and SIF "agents" for
applications like Moodle, SchoolTool, and also OS services like LDAP
would be much easier to set up, administer and use than the free or
proprietary systems we have now.  It would be a big step forward.
Matt Jezorek has resurrected the old Java ZIS and he and I have done a
little work on agent libraries for PHP and Python at
http://sifsoft.com  With contemporary XML processing libraries like
lxml in Python, writing the agent code has been pretty painless so
far.

I'll stop there... I'm not sure if this literally fits into the Edgy
planning process, but it is an important strategic consideration.

Tom Hoffman
SchoolTool Project Manager