The e-Framework

Abstract

The e-Framework is an initiative by Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), the U.K's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), New Zealand’s Ministry of Education (MoE), and the Netherlands SURF Foundation to produce an evolving and sustainable, open standards based, service oriented technical framework to support the education and research communities. The primary goal of the e-Framework is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes.

The e-Framework supports a service oriented approach to developing and delivering education, research and management information systems. Such an approach maximises the flexibility and cost effectiveness with which systems can be deployed, both in an institutional context, nationally and internationally.

The e-Framework allows the communities to document its requirements and processes in a coherent way, and to use these to derive a set of interoperable network services. By documenting requirements, processes, services, protocol bindings, schemas and standards in the form of 'service usage models' members of the community are better able to collaborate on the development of service components that meet their needs (both within the community and with commercial and other international partners).

This paper will outline some of the practical ways in which communities have engaged with the e-Framework and the challenges faced in terms of creating a sustainable and flexible resource base.