San Diego, CA, 16 February 2012— The SIF Community, with the help of partners from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), officially kicked off its new US Management Board directive, of helping to align the various technical standards and data projects, by increasing support for the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) in the upcoming SIF Implementation Specification (US) 3.0. This announcement coincided with the start of NCES’s 25th Annual MIS Data Conference in San Diego, CA.

Dr. Jack Buckley, Commissioner of NCES touted the SIF community’s efforts in supporting the adoption and usage of the CEDS work. “I am pleased to announce that the SIF Association is recasting its 3.0 Specification release to incorporate all of CEDS 2.0 while also renewing emphasis on the use of commercial web standards to exchange data. SIF 3.0 will enable and allow for “CEDS on the Wire” across the country”, announced the Commissioner during his MIS Conference welcome remarks.

The SIF Implementation Specification (US) 3.0 will reflect the complete adoption of all CEDS 2.0 elements to improve tracking lifelong learning from Early Childhood to K12 to Higher Education to the workforce, as well as to enable various other data initiatives such as Race to the Top, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Program, and Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI). Through standardization, the SIF Implementation Specification (US) 3.0 will effectively bring the thousands of successful SIF adoptions across hundreds of school districts in all 50 states under the CEDS umbrella and showcase true standards adoption.

The SIF Implementation Specification (US) 3.0 will:
- Utilize support tools to map the CEDS 2.0 Logical Data Model to the SIF object schemas, which will control the format of CEDS elements as they appear “on the wire”.
- Enhance the SIF Specification to include an updated, web-services infrastructure.
- Combine the mapping and infrastructure parts of the specification to standardize exactly how SIF applications dynamically exchange and report CEDS 2.0 data.
- Standardize the sequence of these CEDS-conformant data exchanges between K-12 applications within a growing set of common educational processes—such as Registration, Assessment Scoring and Student Record Exchange.
- Generate and support a certification process, which can verify whether an application is exchanging—as opposed to merely storing—educational data in conformance with the CEDS Logical Data Model.

“We are proud to announce the decision by the SIF US Management Board of Directors to fully commit SIF to centering the SIF Specification (US) 3.0 around CEDS. This partnership with NCES to enable successful implementation of CEDS will ideally help align the various other data initiatives touting CEDS compatibility – if they work with CEDS it works with SIF for developers and end users”, states Dr. Larry L. Fruth II, SIF Executive Director/CEO.

The SIF Implementation Specification (US) 3.0 release reflects both the evolution of a data standard to extend support beyond K-12 based on CEDS 2.0, and an aggressive shift in emphasis to use of commercial web standards to exchange data. It builds on 15 years of successful SIF adoption in the US and the transition to a global family of standards with UK and Australia SIF communities within the past 5 years. This new strategic direction will also support our growing partnership with NCES and the leadership they are providing for states and schools across this country.

For more information about the CEDS SIF support, please visit:

https://www.sifassociation.org/us/upload/news/61AF76_CEDS_and_SIF_From_Architecture_to_Solution.pdf

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About the SIF Association
The SIF Association is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of over 3,200 schools, districts, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively define the rules and regulations for educational software data interoperability. The SIF Implementation Specification enables diverse applications to interact and share data efficiently, reliably, and securely regardless of the platform hosting those applications. The SIF Association has united these education technology end users and providers in an unprecedented effort to give teachers more time to do what they do best: teach. For further information, visit http://www.sifassociation.org.