20070807 WG Telecon Agenda and Notes - Technical Roadmap Working Group

1. Roll Call

Attending:

Jill Abbott

Avron Barr

Danny Fowler

Tyde Richards (convener)

Schawn Thropp

Tom Wason

Regrets

Mokhtar BenHenda

Neil Cramer

Kiyoshi Nakabayashi

2. Review/Approve Agenda

Approved

Comment by Tyde that this meeting will briefly review current status but will focus on input for a brief position statement on Core SCORM that ADL needs to submit to SC36 by August 12 to ensure agenda time at the September SC36 meeting. This statement will hopefully initiate a collaborative ad hoc study group with SC36/ADL/LETSI on Core SCORM and an ISO/IEC standardization strategy.

3. Discussion of Structure and Use of WG wiki

Discussion that the WG now has a wiki and it will increasing be the focus of collaborative work. Request for any suggestions for improving the WG wiki structure and content. Tyde mentioned the difficulty parties have with the regular telecon time and the future use of the wiki to support asynchornous collaboration. Avron commented that the wiki will not eliminate the need for telecons. Tyde agreed and commented that the bi-weekly telecons will continue.

Proposal by Tyde to set up wiki pages to gather community of practice requirements for Core SCORM. Comment by Jill that this aligns with SIFA intererst in evaluating SCORM. Tyde commented on the desirability of

4. Discussion of WG Charter (brief)

Mention that the draft WG charter in the Wiki needs to be discussed, revised if necessary, and approved by the WG. Action deferred to a future meeting.

5. Review of candidate WG projects (brief)

The candidate projects previously discussed were briefly reviewed.

6. Solicitation of Advisory Group (brief)

Tyde commented that there are parties signed up for the advisory group, that the WG should plan on soliciting their input, but that we are not quite ready to do so. Tyde asked Avron as Strategic Communications WG Co-chair on the status of a LETSI newsletter. Avron commented that the letter is ready for distribution and will go out in the next few days to the parties who attended the London meetings and advisory group. This should serve the immediate need of some communication to the advisory group.

7. Disussion of initial Core SCORM proposal (focus)

Discuss of this topic was merged with the topic below.

8. Discussion of ADL/Core SCORM/SC36 meeting (focus)

We discussed the Core SCORM proposal and WG input on a related but probably more general proposal that ADL needs to submit to SC36 by August 12 to request formation of an SC36 Ad Hoc/Study Group.

Tom raised the issue of guiding requirements, and if the Strategic Communications WG, as the LETSI marketing group, should be providing requirements.

Tyde commented that this is what commercial companies oftern refer to as product marketing, and that the Strategic Communications WG has not been asked to do that. For the time being the Technical Roadmap WG has that on its plate.

Schawn proposed thinking about SCORM in terms of three technical horizons:

a) Immediate - capabilites that SCORM has today

b) Near term - capabilites that have been discussed as future extensions to SCORM but for which there is not yet a clear solution

c) Long term - capabilites that may be desirable but for which the exact connection to SCORM is not yet apparant - an example is a service oriented architectural framework

Core SCORM will focus on the immediate (current) SCORM capabilities but with all capabilites being based on de jure standards.

Tyde mentioned that 2 IEEE standards support the runtime data model and 2 IEEE standards support LOM, and that these should be proposed in SC36.

Tyde requested confirmation that LOM should be part of Core SCORM (because it is optional in SCORM 2004). Schawn commented that it should.

Avron asked for clarification about IEE LOM in SC36 given the SC36 metadata effort (MLR). Tyde commented that he did not feel this would be an issue because Core SCORM is codifying an existing practice based on LOM.

This will require a strategy for the two SCORM capabilites that are not currently based on de jure standards - Content Aggregation and Sequencing.

Many similar specifications and standards exist to support content aggregation. It is a known and commonly solved problem. The capability will be preserved in Core SCORM but for SC36 the proposal is to define a cannonical model based on ISO/IEC 21000-2:2005 (MPEG21.2) against which IMS CP, DITA maps, and other specifications can be mapped to determine their conformance.

In the case of sequencing the capability is relatively new and may require further work. It will not initially be carried over into Core SCORM. Schawn discussed the significant discussion and expertise with sequencing in the ADL TWG, including proposals for alternative approaches. For the time being, ADL, rather than LETSI, will take the lead on discussions about the future of sequencing.

We discusssed the question of whether or not a Web service alternative to the ECMAScript API should be considered as part of Core SCORM. This would be analagous to the HACP functionality in AICC CMI which SCORM did not carry forward and would use the IEEE 1494.11.3 XML data model binding as the message format. Schawn commented that multiple solutions to this have been proposed in the ADL TWG and that a real solution will entail implementation investigation to identify runtime issues that may not be obvious. We agreed that this should not be treated as part of Core SCORM but should be located on the near term horizon of possible future capabilites.

Tyde proposed four near term capabilites to mention in the SC36 position statement that are all based on current or soon to be de jure standards.

1) Web service for runtime data model (IEEE XML binding)

2) Competencey Definitions (IEEE draft standard)

3) Accessibility (ISO/IEC draft standard in SC36 based on IMS work)

4) Quality (ISO/IEC standard in SC36)

In SC36 interested has been expressed in determing the connection between SCORM and 3 and 4.

9. Day/Time Next Meeting

Tuesday, August 21 2007, 12:00 UTC