Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) going Open Source
Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) or even (LDS) are intended to aid state educational agencies to efficiently and accurately manage, analyze and use education data. Most often this means turning out tons for CSV files which are then loaded in staging areas and the pushed into reporting system to include but not limited to a data warehouse. Many of these systems are built over time and recollect the same data over and over.
There is a better way to integrate data and it is to start your SLDS with a SIF enabled Operational Data Store (ODS). According to Bill Inmon, an ODS, is a subject-oriented, volatile, current-valued, detailed-only collection of data in support of an organizations need for up-to-the-second information. Wikipedia states that its designed to integrate data from multiple sources and contains low level (atomic) data with a limited history captured in realtime.
Basically this means that the education agency that implements an ODS has detailed or non-summarized data about the students within its reporting structure. This gives the agency capability to offer services that before might have been more difficult to provide. For example a state agency could construct and support a Parent Portals, Student records transmissions, or even a district reporting system.
So why are we talking about this within OpenZIS blog today – well over the next few months we will begin to document an open source longitudinal data system (SLDS)(LDS) with our first step being the development of a SIF enabled operational data store (ODS).
Thanks
Christopher
SIF Association UK Quarterly Meeting – Connect-a-thon
We will be at the SIF Association’s UK Quarterly Meeting on Oct 7th and 8th. If your a SIF Agent Developer and would like to test your agents with OpenZIS – as well as have an interest in discussing all things SIF related – we will be hanging out with the gang from Equiinet’s.
Cheers.
Christopher
OpenZIS and the Australia SIF Specification
Recently we have had a few developers reach out to us to see if we had an interest in developing for the Australian SIF that is currently in being Piloted. Well the short answer is Yes. We are currently waiting for the SIF Association to publish the Australian SIF Specification so that we can begin our development.
OpenZIS Demo Site Updated
Just wanted to let everyone know that we have added the UK SIF Spec 1.2 as well as the US SIF Spec 2.2 to our Demo site. We should have this available for download within the next few weeks.
OpenSIF – an Open Source SIF XML Library
We have started the development of an open source SIF XML library. This Ruby library will allow you to easy create and read SIF XML data elements.
This project is being housed at GitHub and is currently focusing in on the UK Specification. We have chosen the UK specification as we have had a lot of attention from UK Vendors as well as UK Educational Authorities (Sorry NDA’s).
This first round of development is being done in Ruby – however – we may move to create these same SIF XML Libraries in C#, VB, PHP and Java if there is enough interest.
Thanks,
OpenZIS Team.
UK SIF 1.2 Specification is in Alpha Testing
We have begun Alpha testing UK SIF 1.2 specification. We hope to have a beta release within the OpenZIS Demo site within two weeks and then released the fallowing week to the public.
Install UK SIF 1.1 Specification in your ZIS
Introduction
This post will talk you through the installation of UK SIF Spec 1.1 in to a properly installed ZIS. I will be login in as the user ZIT for this example.
Ubuntu versions tested
Ubuntu 9 64 bit Server Version
Step 0: download SIF 1.1
wget http://www.openzis.org/download/uk_1_1_lib_install.zip
unzip uk_1_1_lib_install.zip
cd uk_1_1_lib_install
Step 1: Load MySQL Data
mysql -u root -p
mysql> use zit
mysql> source uk_1_1_lib_install/install.sql
mysql> commit;
mysql> exit
Step 2: Move the ’sif_schema’ directory
mv uk_1_1_lib_install/sif_schema ZIT_CommunityEdition/ZIT_APPLICIATION
Step 3: Move the ‘uk_1_1_lib’ directory
mv uk_1_1_lib_install/lib/uk_1_1_lib ZIT_CommunityEdition/ZIT_APPLICIATION