Thanks for posting this, Phil.
I had to register for this forum just to provide comment on this. It seems to me that "interoperability review", if that's what the intent of this work was, would include not only a holistic review of the interoperability landscape, but a variety of options for moving forward. I'm not seeing either in this report.
Instead of a holistic view of everything being done around interoperability in the UK education space... Instead of showing both the positive and negative outcomes of the work being done by many people... This paper seems to focus its attention solely on SIF and only cares to mention possible negatives, without diving into any detail whatsoever.
Instead of examining a variety of possible ways forward, including finding more funding for the SIF Association UK to do its work, there seems to be only one way forward being proposed, and it seems to happen to include more money for the group doing the review. Hmmm...
I think the paper speaks for itself on its underlying motives, which show quite visibly around the fragile arguments being made. The arguments being made about SIF being "not designed for this" or "not designed for that" seem to beg the question... Are we just all missing some big spec out there that is actually designed to meet the needs for the whole of the educational marketplace? There is lots of work, indeed to be done to get to the goal of seamless, semantic interoperability. Can't we work together to achieve the goal we are all working towards without this attitude of "not invented here"
I could spend lots of time on this, but I want to clear up some of the most glaring statements that personally affect the work that I do.
Apparently, whoever wrote this paper didn't know who to ask, but the Web Service roadmap for the SIF specification has been very clearly articulated, and will be released early in 2011
Backwards compatibility of Web Services agents to existing SIF transport agents will be fully covered by the ZIS. It will be a seamless transition
SIFA has an international governance structure, and is updating their bylaws to better support international governance.
(Full disclosure... I'm the Co-lead of the SIFA Technical board and spent a lot of time on the design of the UK 1.0 spec).
