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