From Leapspecs

Belongs to Leap2A/specification

Please see the Leap2A/developments for things under active consideration, and Leap2 governance for issues related to the future governance of the spec.

Contents 1 Future developments of Leap2A itself 1.1 Activity streams 1.2 Personal data in alternative formats 1.3 More date and time fields 1.4 Source of an item 1.5 Qualifications 1.6 Structures of skills and competences 1.7 Extra common category schemes 1.8 Better representation of human relationships 1.9 Type 1.10 spatial 1.11 Other specifications to track for ideas 2 The wider future of Leap2 2.1 Leap2R 2.2 Leap2J

Future developments of Leap2A itself

Activity streams

It might be possible to integrate with Activity Streams. In particular, the Atom version of the Activity Streams spec is not very far away from Leap2A in format. It must be remembered that Activity Streams does not deal with activities in Leap2A terms, but rather records of momentary interactions. We would need another Leap2A type to implement this effectively.

Personal data in alternative formats

The Leap2A persondata element was created to bridge a gap between existing specifications of personal data and e-portfolio requirements. However, some tools may already use personal data in an established format, such as vCard, SIF or HR-XML. One straightforward way of including this information would be to have a link from a person item to an attached file in that format.

Another is to look out for future specifications and standards covering this area more adequately.

More date and time fields

It may be desirable at some stage to have earliest and latest versions of start, end, and target dates. This could be used to represent future planning, or past uncertainty.

Source of an item

Those people interested in representing the source of an item, please have a look at the Atom documentation and say if atom:source would help.

Qualifications

What IS a qualification exactly? What are the relationships between people, awarding bodies, assessments, courses, marks/grades, and anything else necessary? This is still an area ripe for development.

Structures of skills and competences

Beyond what is already implemented in the Leap2A/ability type, this is beyond Leap2A, but needs to be picked up.

Extra common category schemes

See also Leap2A/possible categories.

Better representation of human relationships

Are there good standard vocabs around? XFN? HR-XML? something else? The simplest way is probably to just have the vocab used with atom:link in the usual way. Our current person type category scheme only roughly categorises the relationship between the portfolio holder and another person.

Type

If it later appears sensible to have rdf:type as an attribute of the atom:entry element, that might be preferable. However, that doesn't seem to be Atom "style".

spatial

See spatial. We have already agreed to include addresses within this structure. If it becomes meaningful to include further machine-processable geographical information, for instance to allow integration of portfolio information with maps, we would look again at the options, for example KML.

Other specifications to track for ideas

• Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange -- "aggregations".

The wider future of Leap2

Leap2R

If we had an RDF version of Leap2, it would enable the embedding of Leap2 information in any XML file, through the RDFa mechanism.

Developments towards this are already at the Leap2R page.

Leap2J

After Leap2R, how about a JSON serialisation, closely following Leap2R?

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