March 2008 — Features
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Mix Master
The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) has emerged as a cornerstone of K-12 data warehousing, enabling once-isolated information to be shared among diverse systems.
The Champaign Community School District
Unit 4, based in East Central Illinois, is building
a new database management system (DBMS).
The district plans to first assemble a centralized
data warehouse to store student information
currently isolated in a range of custom-built
software systems scattered around the district's
17 schools-everything from attendance management
applications to transportation systems
and food-service programs. Once these information
"silos" are integrated, the district intends to
provide a web-based data access system that
offers an especially high level of transparency for
administrators, teachers, parents, and students.
It's a big project, and a tricky one. Data integration is one of the single most challenging tasks any district can face. Fortunately for Champaign's Unit 4, and the many other school districts throughout the country with data scattered in disparate systems, an open specification known as the Schools Interoperability Framework is mitigating that challenge. For roughly 10 years, SIF has been providing an evolving set of rules and definitions for sharing data among applications to a growing community of K-12 software vendors.
"The SIF specification is critical to this project," says Michael Harden, Unit 4's data analysis manager. "It pulls all the different pieces together so that our district's homegrown databases and proprietary technologies can talk to each other."
First proposed in 1997, SIF is a set of open software and data specs that describes how information can be exchanged among applications in a K-12 setting. It's based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). XML is a platform-neutral, generalpurpose markup language; SOA refers to an architectural approach that loosely couples software systems to provide a set of linked, repeatable business tasks, or "services."
The first SIF-based products began appearing in 2000. At that time, SIF was competing for industry mindshare with another standard: the Electronic Data Interchange, which is a set of information-structuring standards for electronically exchanging data. EDI was used mainly by corporations and government agencies, and it's still widely used for e-commerce. But in K-12 environments, SIF has emerged as the dominant data integration standard.
"Data isolation is a serious problem, wherever you find it," Harden observes. "If the data is difficult to access and share, it fosters problems like data redundancy, problems with data integrity, and inefficient or incomplete reporting. My name might appear as 'Michael Harden' in one DB, and 'M. Harden' or 'Mike Harden' in another. You can't make good decisions with incomplete or inaccurate information."
