xAPI Conformance Research & Future Requirements

July 25, 2017

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During the past year, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative accelerated research and development efforts related to Experience API (xAPI) conformance requirements and certification. The xAPI community was engaged in the research effort, and as a result it led to some extremely valuable and much needed improvements for xAPI.

The first phase of research resulted in the community-driven Conformance Requirements for Learning Record Stores (LRS), the corresponding LRS Test Suite, and xAPI Adopter Registry. Finalizing conformance requirements and implementing a stable test suite was critical to proving the interoperability of LRS implementations in the market.

The second phase of BAA research focused on formalizing the approach for creating and publishing xAPI Profiles. Establishing a consistent approach to xAPI Profiles is fundamentally critical to support semantic interoperability and to overall improve the maturity of xAPI.

As a result of the conformance research work during the past year, several requirements and gaps were identified or in some instances, reinforced. Please take a few minutes to help influence the future direction of xAPI. Your input and feedback are extremely valuable and will help inform future direction of xAPI and where future research efforts should be focused. The table below summarizes all of the deliverables produced as part of this research effort and is being made available to the ADL community.

Summary of Deliverables
Deliverable	Description
xAPI LRS Conformance Requirements Document	The xAPI LRS Conformance Requirements Document lists every MUST requirement explicitly stated (or implicitly is required in order to conform to an explicitly stated requirement) in the xAPI specification, as vetted by the xAPI Community through an open process. From this document, tests of these requirements are created for the LRS Conformance Test software developed by ADL.
xAPI LRS Certification Requirements and Recommendations Document	The xAPI LRS Certification Document is a research-based document offering requirements as gathered by the xAPI Community and recommendations as the research suggests. From these recommendations, ADL Initiative can develop a software certification policy and process that vets software implementations of Learning Record Stores by a third party for conformance to the xAPI specification.
xAPI Profile Specification	There are several deliverables related to the xAPI Profiles specification. The xAPI Profiles specification itself is divided up into three documents, mirroring the approach taken with the xAPI Specification itself: an About section; section about xAPI Profiles Structure which addresses requirements for xAPI Profile schema; and a section detailing communication services to support the hosting and querying of profiles in an xAPI Profiles server.

Related Projects

Experience API (xAPI) Standard: xAPI applies a human (and machine) readable activity streams approach to tracking data with context and state sub-APIs of the learner activities.
xAPI Conformance and Certification Programs: Develop software requirements for xAPI conformance testing and define certification requirements for the professional competencies needed for working with xAPI.