Open Standards For JISC Development Programmes

The Importance of Open Standards

Open standards play an important role in JISC's development programmes in order to help ensure:

• Device-independence
• Application independence
• Avoidance of patented technologies
• Architectural integrity
• Ease interoperability across products from multiple suppliers
• Ease of curation and long term preservation of digital resources

Open standards are of particular importance in a JISC development environment, in order to enable developments in one institution to be reused in another, and to support the diversity of the UK's higher and further education environment.

Open Standards and JISC's Development Programmes

JISC funds a range of development programmes. Various procedures and policies may be developed for the different programme calls. This briefing document outlines some of the key principles related to the selection and use of open standards for project teams (a) preparing proposals and (b) developing project deliverables, once a proposal has been accepted.

The key areas for projects are:

• Ensuring that you have knowledge of open standards relevant to your proposal, including advice provided by JISC and JISC advisory services.
• Ensuring that you have an understanding of potential difficulties and limitations of relevant open standards, and are able to address such concerns.
• Ensuring that you can provide documentation of the section of open standards.
• Ensuring that you have quality assurance procedures in place to ensure you make use of open standards in an appropriate fashion.

Programme-Specific Advice and Procedures

Please note that projects should consult with Programme Managers and appropriate documentation for specific information related to individual programme calls.

Preparing Your Proposal

When preparing a proposal it is important that you are familiar with standards which are relevant to your proposal and to the particular programme you are involved with. You should ensure that you read relevant resources such as resources documented in the programme call, QA Focus advisory resources [1], JISC services such as UKOLN [2], CETIS [3], etc.

Your proposal should demonstrate that you have an understanding of appropriate open standards and that you are able to implement the relevant open standards, or can provide valid reasons if you are not able to do this.

Implementing Your Proposal

If your proposal is accepted you will need to address the issue of the selection and deployment of standards in more detail. For example, you may have a work package on the selection of standards and the technical architecture used to create, manage and use the standards.

It is important that you have appropriate quality assurance processes in place in order to ensure that you are making use of open standards in an appropriate way. Further advice on quality assurance is provided on the QA Focus Web site [4].

Sharing Your Experiences

Since projects may be involved in developing innovative applications and services, making use of standards in innovative ways, making use of emerging standards or prototyping new standards, it is important that feedback is provided on the experiences gained. The feedback may be provided in various ways: on project reports; by producing case studies; by providing feedback on emailing lists, on Wikis, etc.

Where possible it is desirable that the feedback is provided in an open way, allowing other projects, programmes and the wider community to benefits form such experiences. JISC Programmes may put in place structures to support such feedback.

References

1. Briefing documents, QA Focus,
   <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/>
2. UKOLN,
   <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
3. CETIS,
   <http://www.cetis.ac.uk/>
4. Quality Assurance, QA Focus briefing documents,
   <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/#qa>

About This Document

This document was produced to support JISC's development programmes. We are grateful to JISC for their feedback on the document.