The specification with most direct applicability
to this service is the IMS Enterprise
Services specification, v1.0, which contains both interfaces and data models.
There are two service definitions that
apply: GroupManager and GroupsManager. The
former is an interface that applies to single instances of groups, the latter to sets of
groups.
The MIT Open Knowledge Initiative also
provides two relevant Open Service Interface
Definitions (OSIDs), called Course Management and Group Management. These
operate at a different binding point to the IMS interfaces, and are intended to be
implemented within client applications via adapters rather than as a service layer.
There are many basic similarities between
the two sets of specifications, and it is
possible to combine them within an implementation:
Figure 8. Shows the relationship between the various elements needed
to implement the
service
Here, the consumer implementation makes
calls to the service using the API provided by
OKI. The API is implemented to provide web services, defined using the IMS
GroupManager specification.
Not all of the OKI API can be implemented
using IMS Enterprise at present, as there are
some differences between the data model implied by the OKI definition and that provided
by IMS.
