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, and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. 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 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 designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

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

application software Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not operating, administering or programming the computer. An application (app, application program, software application) is any program that can be categorized as ...

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