From: Gabriel Emerson <gemerson@...>
Date: 2002-09-12T07:58:41+09:00
Subject: Education, Ruby, and SIF

I work for a company that mainly assembles and interprets educational 
statistics, and was wondering if anyone here is in a related situation and 
would have a use for a library which implements the Agent functionality of 
the SIF (School Interoperability Framework) standard.  Ideally I'd like to 
work with others on a Ruby Licensed reference implementation.

The Framework (www.sifinfo.org/spec.html) defines routers (ZIS servers) and 
SIF 'agents' which allow vendors and schools, districts, or sections within 
schools (e.g. library, bus scheduling, transcript, test scoring) to 
communicate via XML over a secure connection, allowing all connected 
systems to be updated in real time when an element is added or changed.

While this is a neat idea for education, it could of course be adapted to 
handle other types of XML data.  This might be of interest to anyone who 
regularly has to parse data from a client and wishes there was a secure and 
automatic way to just pull it from their database, accounting software, 
etc.

I am just posting to see if there is any interest or grounds for discussion 
for this.  Post back or email me privately if you like. If you are using 
Ruby for education and aren't necessarily interested in SIF, I'd still like 
to hear back.

--Gabriel Emerson
  Evaluation Software Publishing