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JISC CETIS response to RFI Effectiveness

of Federal Agency Participation in

Standardization in Select Technology

Sectors for National Science and

Technology Council's Sub‐Committee on

Standardization

JISC CETIS

The JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards is an 

Innovation Support Centre advising UK Further and Higher Education (F/HE) on 

the strategic, technical and pedagogical implications of educational technology 

and interoperability standards. CETIS supports the Joint Information Systems 

Committee (JISC) development and innovation programmes and represents UK 

F/HE on a range of international standards bodies including the IMS Global 

Learning Consortium, IEEE LTSC, ISO SC36, BSI, CEN/ISSS WSLT, DCMI, the 

Open Web Foundation and others. Through an iterative cycle of horizon 

scanning, publications, and community engagement, JISC CETIS fulfils a crucial 

role in linking innovative technological and standards developments with national 

UK development programme and initiatives. 

While CETIS are not in a position to draft a comprehensive response to the 

National Institute of Science and Technology’s Request for Information on the 

development and implementation of standards, the Centre has a comprehensive 

portfolio of public documents that are of direct relevance to this RFI. These 

documents address many of the issues raised in the RFI particularly those 

relating to: 

• Benefits of standards development, 

• Standard development lifecycle, 

• Resources required for standard development, 

• Link between standardisation and innovation, 

• Barriers to standard development and implementation, 

• Lessons learned. 
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Relevant Documents and Publications

Assessing the Business Case for Standards: An introduction for strategy

planning  and resourcing committees  

Cooper, A., Kraan, W., Holyfield, S. (2009) Assessing the Business Case 

for Standards: An introduction for strategy planning and resourcing 

committees, JISC CETIS Briefing paper, 

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2009/bpbusinesscasefors

tandards.aspx 

Making a business case for interoperability and standards is a challenging task 

for those involved in the strategic planning of IT systems in educational 

institutions. This briefing with its accompanying references is intended to provide 

advice and supporting materials to help people to incorporate standards in 

their ICT-related business cases. It assumes some familiarity with the way IT 

systems are presently deployed and maintained in educational institutions, and 

will be of interest to Information Services managers and senior managers for 

strategy planning and resourcing. 

This briefing paper covers definitions of interoperability standards, key benefits of 

interoperability standards, how to decide where standards are relevant, 

interoperability without open standards, a middle way?; generic standards vs 

domain specific standards 

The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education – System and Process 

Yuan, L., Wilson, S.B., Cooper, A., and Campbell L.M., (2010), The Future 

of Interoperability and Standards in Education – System and Process, 

JISC CETIS Whitepaper, 

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/3/38/Fis_whitepaper_final_.pdf

In January 2010, JISC CETIS organised a working meeting to bring together 

participants across a range of standards organisations and communities to look 

at the future of interoperability standards in the education sector. This paper 

summarises the views expressed by delegates and outlines present and future 

models for collaboration between open and informal communities and the formal 

standardisation system with particular reference to the current issues and 

barriers in specification and standard development and adoption processes. 

This whitepaper also presents possible directions of future interoperability 

standards in education. 

Barriers to participation, development and adoption: 

• Complex and inflexible standardisation processes. 
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• Lack of inclusiveness in the process of developing and adopting 

specifications and standards. 

• Lack of consistent approach to allow multi-stakeholder collaboration and 

participation. 

• Lack of early implementation of specifications. 

• Lack of ability to create derivative works. 

Open culture and community engagement in technology development and 

standardisation: 

• Ownership, licensing and the copyright of informal specifications. 

• Informal communities require a process to engage with FPS bodies and 

connection to a business need. 

• Public procurement policy does not currently recognise standards from 

this variety of sources. 

Enablers for collaboration between formal and information specifications: 

• Building shared concepts between stakeholders is a key. 

• Criteria for enabling informal specifications to engage with formal 

standardisation organisations. 

• IPR and copyright. 

Suggestions for future development : 

• Raise awareness, especially among policymakers, of the diversity of the 

standards system. Recognise, understand and work with bodies which 

differ across a range of dimensions - e.g. legal status, respect, trust, 

openness and business models. 

• Identify solutions for patent, ownership and licensing issues to enable 

organisations to adopt, ratify, profile or create derivative works from 

specifications developed by other bodies. 

• Improve transparency across the system and increase effective coordination between different bodies through more effective dissemination. 

• Understand the drivers and motivations of stakeholders in the domain, 

manage conflicting expectations, and increase adoption through the 

involvement of more stakeholders. 

• Learn from the culture and lightweight processes of informal specification 

communities, and provide support for adoption, community engagement 

and advocacy from incubation to adoption and beyond. Improve the 

quality of specifications and standards through early implementation and 

evaluation. 

• Use funding support from organisation and governments to make 

specification documents freely available and release them in such a way 

that they can be incorporated into application profiles and adapted to meet 

new requirements. 

• Ensure all completed standards documents and updates are persistently 

identified and available for reference by anyone. 
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Principles for Structuring Data‐oriented Interoperability Specifications  

Cooper, A., (2010), Principles for Structuring Data-oriented Interoperability 

Specifications, JISC CETIS Position Paper, 

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/adam/files/2010/09/fis-suggested-principles-forstructuring-standards.pdf

This paper suggests, at a high level, a set of guiding principles for specifications designed 

for exchanging data (processes and services are a separate concern). It tries to take a view 

that is one step removed from current practices and to identify some general principles 

that can be applied across a range of practices. 

It has been created for discussion and as a contribution to debate about how we should 

approach standard design and documentation in the future, improving on weaknesses and 

avoiding identifiable challenges. It is inspired by a number of examples of emerging 

practice and lessons learned, and largely drawn from people other than the author too 

numerous to acknowledge, over the last decade of work in learning technology 

specifications/standards. 

It is assumed that the specifications are intended for general adoption rather than for 

implementation of point solutions. i.e. that they are “standards” in loose terms. 

This paper is intentionally limited to principles relating to the technical expression and 

does not cover some very important matters of process such as “conceptual calibration” 

before creating the specification and “many eyes” during its creation. 

Collaboration between open, informal specification communities and the

formal standards world: the role of the Open Web Foundation agreements 

Wilson, S.B., (2010), Collaboration between open, informal specification 

communities and the formal standards world: the role of the Open Web 

Foundation agreements, JISC CETIS Blog, 

http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20100105111029

Open, informal specification development enables communities to rapidly 

prototype specification ideas without the overhead of more formal processes, and 

may become the method of choice for working on specifications that anticipate 

future requirements. 

However, when it comes to working with specifications produced in this fashion, 

there are a number of legal and IP barriers both for adoption and for engagement 

in formal standardisation that need to be overcome. Broadly, these are the issues 

of ownership of the specifications, the rights and conditions of use of the 

specification, and the status of patents related to the specifications. Without 

clarity on these issues it is difficult for large organisations and government 
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agencies to adopt the specifications. Formal standards organisations also may 

find it difficult to build on or include informal specifications as a part of formal 

standards for similar reasons. 

The Open Web Foundation is developing key instruments to clarify these issues, 

and which will provide a solid basis on which formal and informal specification 

communities can collaborate in the future. 

Concepts and Standardization in Areas Relating to Competence 

Grant, S. and Young, R., (2010), Concepts and Standardization in Areas 

Relating to Competence, JISC CETIS White 

Paper, http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/rowin/files/2010/08/grantyoungwp_final.pdf

This paper reviews terminology, motivation, history and current work in areas 

relating to skill or competence. Many useful services, clarifying pathways within 

and from education to employment, self-assessment, and selection would be 

facilitated by better standardization of the format in which related definitions are 

represented, and also by a standard approach to representing the structured sets 

often called frameworks. To be effective, information models underlying 

interoperability specifications must be based on common conceptual models; the 

authors propose one such model as a work in progress. The authors see the way 

forward as reaching greater consensus about the components of competence, 

including intended learning outcomes, agreement on a model for frameworks 

allowing reuse of and comparison between components in and between 

frameworks, and investigation of how requirements and claims for skill and 

competence can be coordinated in the light of common practice in recruitment. 

Key Challenges in the Design of Learning Technology Standards: Observations

and Proposals 

Cooper, A., (2010), “Key Challenges in the Design of Learning Technology 

Standards: Observations and Proposals” in International Journal of IT 

Standards and Standardization Research (IJITSR), Vol 8, Issue 

2 http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=46110

This paper considers key challenges that learning technology standards must 

take into account: the inherent connectedness of the information and complexity 

as a cause of emergent behavior. Some of the limitations of historical 

approaches to information systems and standards development are briefly 

considered with generic strategies to tackle complexity and system adaptivity. A 

consideration of the facets of interoperability—organizational, syntactic and 

semantic—leads to an outline of a strategy for dealing with environmental 

complexity in the learning technology standards domain. 
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Community‐Driven Specifications: XCRI, SWORD, and LEAP2A 

Wilson, S.B, (2010), “Community-Driven Specifications: XCRI, SWORD, 

and LEAP2A” in International Journal of IT Standards and Standardization 

Research (IJITSR), Vol 8, Issue 2 http://www.igiglobal.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=46114

This paper explores the issues and opportunities for specifications that develop 

outside of the traditional governance processes of industry consortia or formal 

standards organisations through a discussion and comparison of three 

specifications developed in the education sector: XCRI (eXchanging CourseRelated Information), SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository 

Deposit), and LEAP2.0 (Learner Portfolios 2.0). In each case study, there are 

challenges, opportunities, and accomplishments, and the experiences of each 

project are compared to identify commonalities and differences. Based on these 

case studies, the paper applies the framework developed by Wilson and 

Velayutham (2009) to position the specifications against similar specifications 

from established consortia and formal standards. Finally, the topic of incubating 

specifications is discussed, with implications for funding agencies with an interest 

in supporting interoperability.