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Meeting Materials
Notes
The Enumerations SIG meet and discussed the possible directions in the attached deck. Some key points from the meeting:
Removal of Types
- Members expressed concern over losing some of the "national context" of Ed-Fi standards if Types are removed - that context is about cross sector interoperability and is critical..
- However, some members also reminded the group that the division of Ed-Fi enumerations into Types and Descriptors is confusing (some admitted in fact to not understanding the difference until the SIG - that is, in very mature implementations).
- It was mentioned that – if types are removed -- forcing mappings of local descriptors to Ed-Fi "standard" descriptors (in the ed-fi.org namespace) might be a viable option/way to provide a national context. This is likely to be confusing ("why do I need to choose an Ed-Fi equivalent?" but it might be less than the confusion over what a type is)
- It was also noted that the state use case for Ed-Fi's standards and APIs is often quite different from cross-sector interoperability given how customized that context can become.
- Further, it was in general agreed that in the state context, no enumeration is not subject to modification by policy (i.e. all enumerations are potentially volatile).
Namespaces
- The concept of requiring namespaces for descriptors was agreed on.
- It was also discussed that putting descriptors in a vendor namespace was not a good practice, and should be curtailed in the future as it introduces yet another vocabulary and semantics that downstream applications are VERY unlikely to understand (the downstream app may have no connection to or awareness of that vendor at all).
Modeling of Descriptors
- Some members pointed out that ShortDescription (from the UDM model of Descriptors) is in use in many implementations, as a way to populate drop-down lists where shorter values are needed. In general, the recommendation was to keep both a long and short description.
Supporting multiple operational contexts
- The group would like to see more definition and planning on an implementation of the ODS that would allow for multiple operational contexts via Descriptor mappings.