Profile Meeting 5/20
What do xAPI Profiles do, per the specification, and what specifically don’t they do?
20 May 2020, 3:00pm Eastern
Meeting Minutes
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Team
Host: Aaron Silvers
Community Manager/Secretary: Eva Rendle
Producer: Megan Bowe
Jono Poltrack
Tom Creighton
Florian Tolk
Mark Grant
Marcus Birtwhistle
Brian Duck
Tobi Echevarria
William Hoyt
Avron Barr
Eleni Mangina
Rob Chadwick
Helena Smith
Kristi
Victor Haag
Dr. Jayfur
Jason Haag
“What do xAPI Profiles do, per the specification, and what specifically don’t they do?”
What’s in the profile spec?
Statement Templates
Determining Properties
Patterns
Concepts
Statement Template - a set of instructions for how xAPI statements should be structured. Describes locations within statements and any restrictions that might apply to those values
Determining Properties - used for validation and help us get to a smaller set of data and then deal with it on that level
Patterns - Groups of statements with matching statement templates. Can be helpful in making sense with the data
Different types of patterns - sequence patterns, alternate patterns,
Sequence - in a certain order
Alternate - any pattern may be valid (not particular order)
Can also have secondary pattern
Optional - identifies a single statement template or secondary pattern, this will match if the component is not present once or not at all
One or more - identifies a single statement template or secondary pattern, this will match if the component is present one or more times
Zero or more- identifies a single statement template or secondary pattern, this will match if the component is not present or is present one or more times
Concepts
Concepts are the vocabulary of profiles
Activity, activity type, activity usage type, document, extension, verb
What do we with do with this information?
Things to think about -
Scope and purpose of the profiles
Trying to describe a small set of concepts? (Open badges example)
Or an all-encompassing domain (assessment example)
How general or granular is the need?
Patterns
General or tightly scoped
Can be domain specific or series of events
Only sequences and alternates can have more than one statement template associaited
Determining Properties
Verb (obvious)
ObjectActivity type
Can save a lot of processing time
ContextCategoryActivity Type
ContextParentActivityType
etc..
Concepts
Patterns and templates are starting points of concepts from top down
Then from bottom up identify concepts as building blocks for statements
Compare that list to previously designed concepts
Re-use, re-use
Last resort is building new concepts. Don’t want to add new if they already exist
Inefficencies and Wastes to address
“DOWNTIME”
Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non or under-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra Processing
Comments from Group:
Florian Tolk - saves us from sending duplicative data
Jono Poltrack - extra processing (not having to clean /massage the data to make it work) - it’s significant work for an LRS
Open questions from group
Jono: Thoughts on the use of “see also” to point out additional information that can’t be seen in JSONLD
Spec is like a schema, doing xAPI correctly, etc.
But what might be needed - parent course information is needed, some meaning can’t be represented in JSON-LD
Aaron: this talk focused on the things specifically controlled by the spec / JSON-LD
Other side is stuff not represented by JSONLD.. Like what Jono is describing
That is vital - it has to work, and has to be documented.. So “see also” links very important if we cannot account for them or automate right now
May learn new things for the future, but right now, need that documentation
Florian - what are the steps we can take to mitigate those weaknesses?
Aaron: Scope notes is really how we do that at this time
Jono: Parallel to SCORM - they do this type of thing.. If it’s written in xsd and needs to go into xml, there are practices.
Will need to do that with JSONLD as well.
Next Meeting June 10th - topic will be, “What design and development workflows could xAPI Profiles support?”
References & Source Material
Today’s slides: https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=1A38054E917D27FE!197&ithint=file%2cpptx&authkey=!As48DawGFnbS1no