An interesting paper on “Openness” has come out of a collection of UK infrastructure projects. I believe Scott Wilson presented this paper recently at ELPUB2007. It mentions the difficulties of standardisation, vendor interests, and incompatible profiling. The CETIS experience (Scott’s section I presume) has made some interesting observations about the ‘Simple, Sloppy, and Scalable’ Web2.0 approach to interoperability compared with the e-learning sector’s approach.
In my opinion, the e-Framework is attempting to address some of his contextual model for use of standards (see figure 2). The e-Framework is a Resource Base that includes Context and Policy. While it doesn’t programmatically validate Compliance it does document Compliance. One of the goals is to facilitate community (user and developer) discussion around context, standards profiles, models of usage and interoperability.
View the article here.
Scott’s blog article on the ELPUB2007 conference, Open Access in Vienna.