About The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF)

SIF was developed in order to provide administrators, teachers, and other school personnel access to secure, current and accurate data, decreasing the time spent on data entry and affording more time to spend on students.

What is the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF)?
How does SIF work?
SIF Specification
SIF Zone
SIF Security


What is the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF)?

SIF is a non-profit membership organization driven by primary and secondary education technology providers and users to improve management and accessibility of data within schools, districts, and states.

SIF enables diverse applications to interact and share data efficiently, reliably and securely regardless of the platform hosting the applications. Over 100 education technology providers have come together to create the SIF Specification.

The participating SIF-certified applications comprise the SIF Zone, where the Zone Integration Server (ZIS) mediates communication between these applications. Each application within the Zone interfaces with the Zone through an extension, referred to as an Agent. Agents allow data sharing between applications independent of vendor and platform type. In essence, Agents serve as translators from native application language to standard SIF format.

The ZIS keeps track of all Agents registered in the Zone and enables them to provide data, subscribe to events, request data and respond to requests.

Logical subsets of data shared by the applications in the Zone are called Data Objects. Data Objects cover a variety of student-related information. For example, a student's name, address and phone number are part of the 'StudentPersonal' Data Object.

Data is shared between applications through a series of standard messages written in XML defined by the SIF Specification, and sent using Internet protocols.

The SIF Specification is a set of documents that describe common definitions for school data and the rules for how this data can be shared. Having a common definition of student data makes it possible for applications to share information properly. SIF data is defined using a series of Data Objects. The SIF Specification is an on-going development process and new objects are added with every new release.

In addition to Data Objects, the SIF Specification also defines the rules for how software programs can send these Data Objects to each other. This set of rules is called the 'infrastructure'. By using open and commonly available means to transport these Data Objects, SIF ensures that all school systems are able to implement it regardless of the type of platforms and networks they use.

The SIF Zone consists of one or more applications and a Zone Integration Server (ZIS). One common use of SIF is to connect products from different vendors within a single district. These applications could include student management, food service, library, and others.

Each application in the Zone will have an interface program provided by the vendor, called an Agent, which is simply an extension of the application that connects the application to the ZIS. An application relies on its Agent to exchange data with other Agents, using ZIS as a routing resource.

Data is shared between applications through a series of standard messages written in XML defined by the SIF Specification and sent using secure Internet protocols.

The SIF Security Model focuses on three main areas:

Encryption is a mechanism to ensure that only the sender and the receiver of a message can view its contents.
In a totally secure model, all communications between agent and ZIS are encrypted. SIF HTTPS is the default communication protocol that has to be supported by all agents within the Zone. SIF provides a method for an agent to specify to the ZIS the security level between the ZIS and other agents when delivering originator's data. Each ZIS implementation must guarantee the security level requested by the originator.

Authentication provides the means for verifying the identity of the message author. It also ensures that each message arrives to the destination in its original state.

Access Control grants the Zone administrator complete control over the communication among agents. It also provides means for controlling which data object an application can provide or request, or which events applications can send and receive.