1. The Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC), XML Forum, and Standards Setting in Higher Education Jim Farmer University of Delaware instructional media + magic, inc. As prepared for the EDUCAUSE Advisory Group on Administrative Information Systems and Services October 29, 2001, Indianapolis, Indiana

2. The PESC organization PESC XML Forum Annual Conference Committee Ad Hoc Workgroups “Governance Structure,” Oct. 23, 2001 Architecture Committee

3. The PESC Board www.StandardsCouncil.org, Oct. 25, 2001

4. The XML Forum Steering Committee “The Standard,” September 2001

5. Current efforts By December 2001: Student loan specification Based on NCHELP’s CommonLine, could include IFX’s LoanML for student loans Admissions/Registration specification Update of the ANSI EDI transaction sets

6. Standards development process Identify extant data “requirements” Compare and contrast data elements from the different specifications Create one data element for data elements common to more than one specification Create XML tags ------------ Observation ------------ The process depends on historical standards and focuses almost exclusively on domain expertise.

7. The issues School perspective Expertise in current information technology XML schemas, SAML, SOAP, UML Coordination/collaboration with emerging XML standards WSDL, UDDI, ebXML, DSML, IFX, XBRL, SyncML

8. The college and university perspective Multiple standards will apply to data exchanges for similar purposes, especially financial services. Each “trading partner” has some unique implementation of the specification. Mark Forier, University of Phoenix, XML Forum, Oct 23, 2001

9. Financial services standards College or University Banks Department of Education Common Record IFX EBPP, LoanML Guaranty Agencies CommonLine

10. Participant interests

11. Standards and their implementation MeteorED SFA Announced [March 2001] Expected UML XML Java SOAP XML-RPC UDDI SAML May 15 Planned [Feb 2000] Justin Tilton, PESC Conference, May 17, 2001

12. Technology standards M - from Meteor installation O - optional Industry OSFA Meteor JA-SIG uPortal IBM Web Services Microsoft.Net Sun One Java Programming Language XML Markup Language SOAP Data Transport M UDDI Directory M WSDL Service Description M

13. Expertise Standards setting requires: expertise in XML, XML schema, and XSLT technologies (and possibly UML), expertise in infrastructure standards and Web services technology, and knowledge of other specifications relevant to the domain. ------------ Observation ------------ In higher education, this expertise is found in the Internet 2 project, and individuals who have participated in other real-time, XML standards activities.

14. Related industry standards

15. Defining projects - student records FACTS - Florida Academic Counseling and Tracking System ETTP - California community college’s Electronic Transcript Transport Project CAS - Arizona’s Course Applicability System SIF - (K-12) School Interoperability Framework Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, et al CSIS - (K-12) California Schools Information System Project Based on discussions at the XML Forum, October 23, 2001

16. Defining projects - financial aid Common Record/CommonLine/LoanML, U.S. Department of Education, National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs, Interactive Financial Exchange Meteor - National Council of Higher Education Loan programs, an “open source” student aid information service Florida State University’s Student Information System Based on discussions at the XML Forum, October 23, 2001

17. Defining projects - teaching and learning MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative George Washington University’s Prometheus Blackboard’s Course and Portal Solutions WebCT’s course management system all “implementing” the Instruction Management Systems (IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.), ADL (Department of Defense Advanced Distributed Learning Co-lab), and AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee) specifications

18. Defining projects - portal standards IBM’s open source JetSpeed Epicentric’s Foundation Server JA-SIG’s uPortal

19. Convergence From Justin Tilton’s presentation at the PESC Conference, May 17, 2001

20. Convergence: data transport September 2000AprilMarch SOAP [NCHELP ESC] SOAP [SFA] ebXML [PESC] “Simple SOAP” [Meteor]

21. Convergence: business messages June 2000MayDecember CommonLine XML [ESC] LoanML [IFX] Common Record [SFA] CommonLine R5 [ESC]

22. Convergence: authentication December 2000JuneMarch SFA [NCS Proprietary] SAML [Oasis] S2ML [Netegrity] AuthML [Securant] XTASS [VeriSign] Internet 2 [Shibboleth]

23. The end jxf@immagic.com

24. eBusiness Web services architecture XML “tagged” data content eXtensible Markup Language SOAP data transport Simple Object Access Protocol XSL transformations for presentation eXtensible stylesheet language XML Digital Signature for Server Authentication UDDI/WSDL directory services Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration,and Web Services Description Language