Learning Information Services

1EdTech's Learning Information Services (LIS) specification defines how systems manage the exchange of information that describes people, groups, memberships, courses, and outcomes within the context of learning. The LIS v2.x specification supersedes the Enterprise Services v1.0 specification. The LIS specification is based on the aggregation of the Person Management, Group Management, Membership Management, Course Management, Outcomes Management, and Bulk Data Exchange Management Services specifications. The LIS v2.0 can be implemented using a Web Services infrastructure (based on a SOAP http transport mechanism) and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

An implementation is not required to support every service or operation. Interoperability is best defined through the use of a Domain Profile. This specification includes such a profile for higher education. Interoperability is supported between systems that implement the same profile.

Technical Overview

The LIS documentation consists of:

• The LIS Specification - describes how the LIS is composed using its six component services;
• Information Models - these documents contain the normative description of the various service definitions, data structures, and their relationships. Each of the six services has its own Information Model;
• Binding documents - each of the Information models has an associated WSDL binding document. Some of the services also have an LDAP binding document;
• Best Practice & Implementation Guide - this is intended to provide vendors with an overall understanding of the 1EdTech LIS Specification, the relationship of the specification with other 1EdTech specifications, and a best practices guide derived from the experiences of those using the specification. The guide also includes several actual examples that describe how vendors can make the best use of the 1EdTech LIS Specification;
• Core Profiles & Conformance Specification - a set of profiles of the LIS specification has been created. The Core Profiles identify the minimal subset of the functionality that must be supported by systems developed for deployment in HE. These Profiles (there is a Core plus several Additions) define the set of operations and data models that must be supported by the systems supporting the set of services within the LIS. Each profile contains its Conformance Specification against which compliant systems are tested;
• The Binding Files - one of the outputs of the LIS specification is the set of Web Services Description Language/XML Schema Definition (WSDL/XSD) binding files. Each service has its own set of WSDL/XSD files. These files are used by code-generation tools to create the source code that handles the SOAP messages and XML data structures. Some small changes are required to the WSDL files to map the SOAP messages to the actual server-based implementation of the Web Service. Each of the services has a set of vocabulary files that contain the set of default vocabularies defined in the Information Model. The vocabulary files are instances of the 1EdTech Vocabulary Data Exchange (VDEX) specification.

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