TAG Meeting 2015-09-02

Owned by Eric Jansson (inactive account)
Last updated: Sep 03, 2015
2 min read

Attendees:

  • Don Dailey
  • Duy Nguyen
  • Erik Gomez
  • Josh Allen
  • Josh Klein
  • Mark Reichert
  • Mark Walls
  • Matt Warden
  • Neil Schuh
  • Chris Moffat
  • Eric Jansson
  • Kevin Hurwitz

Agenda:

  1. Housekeeping items related to Confluence access and meeting scheduling – Eric Jansson
  2.  Increasing ODS support for longitudinal data  - Kevin Hurwitz
  3. Ed-Fi Certification -  high-level overview and group input and questions – Eric Jansson
  4. Ed-Fi Summit and Boot Camp input – Chris Moffat (not covered)

Notes:

Data warehouse / multi-year ODS discussion

Kevin Hurwitz presented a basic overview of the market demand and some of his research into increasing support for Ed-Fi ODS support for multi-year data (no slides - verbal). Some of the drivers include the desire of agencies to increase ownership of data in a more controlled fashion, concerns about the scalability of current practice of "warehousing" each ODS database after the current year, and the desire for more multi-year reporting and analytics.

Comments mostly indicated that these use cases were indeed needs / field issues and that there was interest in pursuing this research and work further. However, a number of concerns were raised in the discussion:

  • Would a multi-year ODS contain enough source data to provide for the "ownership" scenarios agencies want? The example of migrating SIS's was raised: would there be enough data in a SIS to support such a migration?
  • Inherent difficulties in longitudinal data stores and maintaining them over time as schemas and vocabularies change. This complexity results in difficulties in longitudinal reporting (i.e. would it meet the use cases needed) and would add complexity to the ODS and the APIs.
  • A more complex ODS could hurt market adoption.  Multi-year data introduces complexity, and complexity is particularly an issue with smaller agencies. There was discussion as to if the longitudinal features could be optional and if that would address these issues.
  • Performance concerns. The additional system complexity would have performance impacts as well.

Ed-Fi Certification

Eric provided a brief overview of Ed-Fi Alliance certification planning to date - see the slides attached.

  • One question concerned if the Alliance was looking at implementation certification or product certification and the general direction currently is: provide certification for products, and tools for validation of field implementations.
  • The question of the "gap" in the Ed-Fi standards for API exchange was raised, and invited the question of if the REST APIs should be promoted as a standard (not taken on for a full discussion at the meeting).
  • Concerns about scalability and time/efficiency of certification were raised as well.
  • One comment on the process was that it needed to be possible to "step back" to an earlier state in the test process if the test uses the ODS, as the ODS database may have been left in a partial or corrupted state due to earlier transactions.