The SIF Implementation Specification is an open standard to provide interoperability. It has arisen from a considerable amount of collaborative work and has been operational in the USA for many years. In Australia SIF Association AU is utilising that combined learning and building a localised data set to meet our specific needs.

The SIF Association is a global non-profit membership organisation whose members include over 1300 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organisations active in primary and secondary (K-12) markets.

This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification.  The SIF Implementation Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or a state to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications. 

The Australian version of SIF

The SIF Association AU is bringing SIF to Australia, and leverages what has been developed and learnt to apply it in an Australian way, in collaboration with Australian Education systems and Australian Software vendors.

The initial Australian data set, SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 1.0r1, was released at the end of the Q1 2009 as a release candidate one. This data set was put forward to be improved by on vendors and educational jurisdictions of Australia. These improvements formed the basis for the full release version one, SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 1.0, which has been used in the SIF Association AU Pilot Program Phase 2 Projects.

With Australian community involvement SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 1.1 was released in December 2010.

A certification program will become available as the Australian Specification develops.

Meeting the Interoperability Challenge

Since 1997, education software companies, school technology coordinators, and administrators have met to discuss ways to answer the interoperability challenge. Their solution: the Schools Interoperability Framework, a specification to:   

    * Define standard formats for shared data e.g., student demographics information 
    * Define standard naming conventions for this shared data   
    * Define the rules of interaction among software applications 

How will SIF benefit your institution?
By using a standard set of specifications, education software companies would: 
    * Ensure that data is entered only once in one application—and automatically propagates to other applications. 
     *Allow applications to exchange data more effectively.
     *Allow educators to deliver reports securely to various organisations via the Internet.  
     *Ensure accurate data on which to base teaching and learning decisions.