Washington, DC, 14 December 2022— The National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) on behalf of the Australian A4L Community is proud to publish the SIF Data Model Specification (Australia) 3.5 to the marketplace. This represents the first major release of the Australian SIF Data Model Specification since October 2016.
Breaking changes in the Specification have been minimized to avoid disruption, and involve:
• Removal of objects no longer in use in the Australian community (ResourceUsage, SystemRole);
• Treating fixed decimal fields as text rather than numerals, to avoid floating point issues under JSON (XML is unaffected);
• Rationalizing and trimming down the SIF_Metadata container, removing a large number of unused complex elements./p>
The major addition to this version of the Specification has been a StudentDataTransferNote object, to be used to enable transfer of student information across state boundaries in the new national Student Data Transfer Exchange, which uses the standardized global SIF infrastructure as its transport. Several minor additions have also been made at the request of the Queensland and Victorian education departments.
The SIF Data Model Specification (Australia) 3.5 is available from the A4L website here: https://data.a4l.org/sif-specifications-australia/
To find out more about the global SIF Infrastructure Specification, please visit: https://data.a4l.org/sif-infrastructure/