The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) is an organization responsible for the

specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

of software interfaces comprising a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on high level service definitions. The OKI specifically focuses on educational software environments.

Description

The Open Knowledge Initiative was initially sponsored by the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

, and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. The goal of an SOA is to provide a separation between the interface of a service and its underlying implementation such that consumers (applications) can

interoperate Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

across the widest set of service providers (implementations) and providers can easily be swapped ''on-the-fly'' without modification to application code. Using this architectural style preserves the

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

investment as underlying technologies and mechanisms evolve and allows enterprises to incorporate externally developed

application software Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

without the cost of a porting effort to achieve interoperability with an existing computing infrastructure. OKI has designed and published a suite of software interfaces known as Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), each of which describes a logical computing service. In contrast to other interface definitions that encapsulate a specific technology, an OSID more easily permits a variety of technologies to interoperate through its interfaces for a given service.

References

* Baving, T., Cook, D., Green, T
''Integrating the Educational Enterprise''
2003.

External links

* * {{Sourceforge, okiproject Information technology organizations based in North America Service-oriented (business computing) Standards organizations in the United States Massachusetts Institute of Technology