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Joint Enterprise Standards Committee (JESC) Applications Technical Working Group

About JESC
The JESC serves as the governance body for DoD information technology (IT) standards, and for Intelligence Community (IC) enterprise standards. These include data standards critical to the ADL Initiative’s development of a Total Learning Architecture (TLA) for DoD education and training.

The JESC, which includes subordinate committees, working groups, and ad-hoc enterprise standards activities, recommends common enterprise standards, profiles, and specifications for DoD and IC information environments. Standards approved by this committee are mandated by DoD’s Chief Information Officer for Department-wide use and acquisitions.

Applications Technical Working Groups (TWGs)
TWGs are responsible for reviewing and recommending relevant standards to the JESC senior committee. ADL Initiative Acting Director, Laura Milham, Ph.D., chairs an Applications-focused TWG that manages standards that affect application programming, web services, and system interoperability. This Applications TWG also covers standards for graphics, user interfaces, databases, and application services.

The ADL Initiative, in chairing the Applications TWG, supports the review of Change Requests (CRs) for new standards, renewal of existing standards, and deprecation of old standards. Other responsibilities include moderating the TWG, coordination of two or more annual meetings, and performing updates to the DoD IT Standards Registry (DISR) based on the resolution of CRs in the TWG meetings.

  • Meeting Schedule: Two meeting cycles per year (2-4 meetings per cycle). See the DoD Information Technology Standards Registry (DISR) calendar for more information on attending. Participation on the JESC Applications TWG is limited to DoD personnel.

New Emerging Standards
Through its involvement in the Applications TWG, the ADL Initiative has elevated three prominent TLA-oriented technical standards and a technical guidance document to “emerging” DISR recognized standards.

  • The Experience API (xAPI) standard allows for the tracking of learning and performance data of individuals and teams.

  • The cmi5 standard defines specific uses of xAPI within the context of traditional web-based content, but also opens possibilities for tracking beyond progress and scores and beyond “courses”.

  • The Sharable Competency Definition, creates a data model for the use of knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes, tasks, and any other data that a competency can represent. The technical guidance document, Recommended Practices for Defining Competencies, provides industry best practices and describes how to apply these best practices to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Shareable Competency Definition standard. Both the standard and the guidance document have passed its IEEE ballot phase.