Agenda

• Highlights from summer-time Special Interest Groups

  • API Standard

  • Managed Service Providers

  • Student Information Systems

• Analytics Middle Tier resuscitated

• Release cadence revisited, in brief

• Building a validation ecosystem

  • Should the community do more to share validation processes and knowledge?

  • What tools / practices should the Ed-Fi Alliance consider to facilitate such an exchange?

Materials

Participants

Notes

API Standard SIG

• Was there discussion around making the API Standard the standard  instead of the Data Standard? → No, did not discuss that.

• Data Standard is what unifies the work from Ed-Fi 1 through Ed-Fi 3+: moved from XML file exchange based on the standard to web API-based data exchange.

• Acknowledge it is an important question that should be revisited.

  • Is there a practical way that the Data Standard team could develop the standard from an "API first" perspective?

  • One answer: yes, build an ontology instead of a table model

    • Isn't that what the Ed-Fi Data Model has? An ontology? A database table model is secondary and only in service to the API.

  • Confusion may be in what we call things.

  • The API definition is what ultimately matters even today.

  • Can Open API spec do a good job of representing entity relationships, as the current Data Standard / Data Model do?

    • Yes, through an ontology.

    • What does that even mean though?

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language

Managed Service Providers SIG

• Release cadence - still has a problem with a gap year.

• Maybe more correct to say there is a potential misalignment of an Ed-Fi gap year with a state gap year, several years down the line. Extend diagram through 2027-2028 to see the issue.

• In general we hope that we don't need a Data Standard 6 in 2025. That is, we're not aiming to have breaking changes, just preparing for the possibility.

• Do states recommend break-rest-rest-break: two rest years? Or break-rest-break-rest?

  • need to gather more facts about this.

• Three year stability problem as drawn out by Andrew Rice:
  
  

  Open

  

Analytics Middle Tier

• Alliance's recommendation is to go with API-first approach, not direct database access.

• TAG feedback in the past has been to drop support for AMT.

• However, we have more AMT users than we realized, as was revealed at the 2023 Summit when we announced an end of support for AMT.

• All acknowledge that we want to discourage use of AMT. Sense of the meeting was clear: this group prefers that we not release an update with .NET 8 and Data Standard 5 support.

• What alternatives do we have? Are they easy enough to use?

  • API-to-AMT proof of concept project
    
    

  • Education Analytics EDU
    
    

Validation Ecosystem

Ran out of time for discussion.

Next Meeting

Jan 18, 2024 

1. Release cadence

2. Future of ODS/API

3. AMT

Action Items