10.8 Recommendations

This section gathers recommendations made by the experts who participated in the development of this chapter. They represent the proposed action lines made by the LIFE consortium as far as Enterprise specifications are concerned:

Recommendation 1. To raise the level of understanding of the role and importance of LT specifications and standards among policymakers and pedagogues as well as among civil servants working with education. Software and systems that conform to open and international standards that have community support should be favoured when purchasing systems for the public sector. Such policy can be expressed in regulating documents for purchasing systems or even be regulated by law - which is already the case or suggested in some countries and/or sectors .

This recommendation is made in the context of a broader understanding of the role of adopted standards in education. The overall LIFE report emphasizes that it is neither possible nor desirable to devise and adopt standards for all educational processes as this would lead to a static and centralized enterprise. It follows that any over encouragement for compliance may be framed around either formal or informal standards.

Recommendation 2. To gather experts in order to identify the workflows and processes involved in the Education Enterprise. Integration between organizations not only requires an exchange of data, but must also consider incompatibilities between workflows, semantics, and the software. If the output of one organization does not match the input of another, data integration and interoperability will not be completely successful.

Recommendation 3. To support the development of plug and play software that can be glued with the already existing Education Enterprise environment. Modularised learning environments, with clearly defined interfaces with the Enterprise world, must be produced in order to ease the development of a holistic approach based upon the combination of, as small as possible, software components.

Recommendation 4. To develop reference models and frameworks for the Education Enterprise. These must be as technology neutral and general (e.g. flexible) as possible. Avoiding too detailed prescriptions of what (types of) services and components to be included in the basic layers.

Recommendation 5. To discourage any proposals for a monolithic system architecture; adopt a distributed model made up of distinct, stand-alone components that communicate over open protocols/interfaces.

Recommendation 6. To build or find applications that map between different languages and ontologies using

Communication protocols (HTTP, SOAP, XML-RPC, Peer-to-peer, etc.);
Communication languages (OAI, ECL, eduSplash, etc.);
Metadata (IEEE LOM, Dublin core); and
Ontologies made up of vocabularies for metadata.

Recommendation 7. To develop an appropriate system for unique identifiers. The EU should support and possibly fund the process to agree on a universal unique identifiers model as well as the research towards and eventual deployment of a suitable system to manage it.

Recommendation 8. To fund research on the means of management of digital rights taking into account European businesses and pedagogical models. It would be a valuable step for the various communities running experimental repositories and discovery services to invite commercial publishers to explore their holdings. This would allow some experimentation with rights management and delivery as well as discovery and get the publishing industry more involved with the development of interoperable content and distribution through interoperable services.

Recommendation 9. To support the development of standards and technology that allow any Web-enabled application to send and control learning-related information to learning-supporting systems and standards that enable a learning-supporting system to listen for and compile such information. Many standards are needed to support this. A learning-supporting system must have a way to identify which application is sending what information about which learners and standards must be in place to enable the information to be collated and analyzed.

Recommendation 10. To provide a method for a community to drive the evolution of precise terms for types of interoperability and definitions for the Education Enterprise.

Recommendation 11. To adopt Enterprise specifications based on a joint effort between the needed theoretical work and the pragmatic experience through implementations that adhere to proper Software Engineering practices.