March 2002 — Special Feature
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The Work Behind SIF's Framework
For almost 30 years, computer technology has made gradual inroads into all aspects of the educational enterprise: from early minicomputers used for scheduling and record keeping; to the Apple IIe and the IBM PC as early word processors; to today's multimedia powerhouses and the almost ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet.
Until recently, however, these disparate systems and the information they contained were isolated islands of data, kept separate by incompatible file formats and competing data structures. The methods used to collect, organize and analyze this information have often been slow, labor intensive and redundant. Double or triple entry, isolated and proprietary software programs, and decentralized data collection have all become staples of the school information culture.
This data isolation means that the information contained in these many systems was either unavailable for use in management decision making, longitudinal planning or educational evaluation. Or if it was available, literally years of staff time was required to make it even marginally useful; to the extent that often planning for even the near future required reliance on data that only dimly confirmed the distant past. With today's increasing emphasis on accountability, the need for accuracy and efficiency are greater than ever. To help overcome the technical hurdles of data sharing, and to help schools streamline administrative reporting and improve school management, a group of software companies and school systems joined together in 1999 to create the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF).
Building the SIF Specification
Since its inception, SIF has grown to an organization of more than 100 software vendors, school districts and other organizations active in K-12 education. They have been working to create a set of rules and definitions that will allow software programs from different companies to share information quickly, seamlessly and securely. This set of rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification (the Specification), and the most recent version was released in September 2001. Using software that conforms to the Specification makes it possible for schools and school systems to share data internally and externally, without any additional programming by the local school or district, and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendor's applications.
The Specification itself is a set of documents written by SIF working groups. These groups are primarily composed of software engineers from K-12 educational software companies who volunteer their time to work on the Specification. The groups are focused on segments of the K-12 enterprise, including, library, cafeteria, transportation, student information systems, instructional services, gradebook and data warehousing. These groups represent a wide cross section of the software companies active in K-12, and are responsible for developing a set of common definitions for school data. These common data definitions are called "Data Objects."
