Overview

This inten­tion of this doc­u­ment is to explain steps that have been tak­en at Visu­al Soft­ware to pro­vide facil­i­ties for a Web Ser­vices-based deliv­ery of core parts of the Schools Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the US, UK and Australia.

The orig­i­nal pur­pose of this web ser­vice was to meet inter­nal VSI needs that would allow our prod­ucts to auto­mat­i­cal­ly update them­selves from a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry, allow­ing us to deploy new ver­sions, changes and cor­rec­tions in a more time­ly and con­sis­tent man­ner. After hear­ing that the SIF com­mu­ni­ty was also look­ing for some­thing sim­i­lar, we made the offer to make this ser­vice pub­licly avail­able for con­sump­tion by those who would ben­e­fit, at least for the short term.

Technical Overview

At its core are four tables that main­tain four types of spec­i­fi­ca­tion information:

• sifOb­jects - this describes each dif­fer­ent spec­i­fi­ca­tion of each object that is part of the data mod­el and pro­vides descrip­tive infor­ma­tion that has been pub­lished in the offi­cial documentation
• sifEn­ti­ties - these are the attrib­ut­es and objects. The infor­ma­tion stored includes every­thing that is includ­ed in the spec­i­fi­ca­tion as well as the entity's rela­tion­ship with any con­tain­er in which it may belong
• sif­Code­Val­ues - this table main­tains infor­ma­tion about every code val­ue for every spec­i­fi­ca­tion, the map­pings, and the descriptions.
• sifEx­tend­edEle­ments - this is a reg­istry of Extend­ed Ele­ments. If an orga­ni­za­tion want­ed to add an extend­ed ele­ment, it would not add a new enti­ty, but would define a new Extend­ed Ele­ment name val­ue. This table would keep track of who defined them and what they are used for.

Database Definitions

The web ser­vice pub­lish­es data from the four above tables. These tables are defined as follows:

sifObjects

(this table still needs doc­u­men­ta­tion and editing)

sifEntities

(this table still needs editing)

sifCodeValues

sifExtendedElements

(this still needs doc­u­men­ta­tion and editing)

	Name	Data Type	Max Length (Bytes)	Allow Nulls	Iden­ti­ty	Default
	Record­ID	int	4	no	1–1
	Country­Code	varchar(10)	10	yes
	Data­Model­Version	varchar(10)	10	yes
	Infrastructure­Version	varchar(10)	10	yes
	Locality­Name	varchar(50)	50	yes
	Object­Name	varchar(175)	175	yes
	Extended­Element­Name	varchar(255)	255	yes
	Extended­Element­Type	varchar(max)	max	yes
	Descrip­tion	varchar(max)	max	yes
	Date­Created	date­time	8	yes		(get­date())
	Last­Updated	date­time	8	yes		(get­date())
	Is­Deprecated	bit	1	yes		((0))
	Is­Deleted	bit	1	yes		((0))
	Created­By	varchar(255)	255	yes		('admin')
	Maintained­By	varchar(255)	255	yes

The SIFSpecService.svc Web Service

The SIFSpecService.svc web ser­vice is avail­able to appli­ca­tions to query this data­base and will be avail­able in the future for updat­ing it as well. This web ser­vice expos­es an ODa­ta inter­face which allows it to be access­able by many off-the-shelf libraries, devel­op­ment envi­ron­ments and exist­ing appli­caitons as if it were a local data­base connection.