SIF

SIF, the Schools Interoperablity Framework, is an industry initiative to develop an open specification for ensuring that K-12 instructional and administrative software applications work together more effectively. SIF is not a product, but rather an industry-supported technical blueprint for K-12 software that will enable diverse applications to interact and share data seamlessly; now and in the future.

Education is facing a critical challenge in deploying technology due to the lack of interoperability among software packages that were designed to serve a single discrete purpose. Today, applications available for K-12 schools and their districts are either closed systems or systems that allow customer access only through proprietary interfaces and often proprietary data formats. To a user, the lack of interoperability means that applications and the application data are islands that cannot talk to each other.  This means that if two different applications need the same data (such as a student ID), the data must be redundantly stored in each application.  This leads to costly, inefficient, and error prone mechanisms for data reporting.   As a separate issue, complete data is not easily accessible to decision makers.  Individual queries must be made to each system.  Report data can not be easily aggregated or summarized.

The goal of SIF is to provide an XML framework for the interchange of application data among the instructional and administrative software applications in the schools.  Using XML and the SIF interchange framework, diverse applications will at last find a framework for interacting and sharing data in a seamless fashion.  Likewise administrators can more easily aggregate and summarize data in just the reports they need for ongoing decision making.