To find Information Standards Board (ISB) standards visit the standards library filter.
For background and explanatory information please see the details below.
This standards library holds documents that have been approved, are in progress or have been rejected by the Education, Skills and Children’s Services (ESCS) ISB.
The standards are intended for use by, for example, ICT procurers, system developers, programmers, data modellers, standards setters and statisticians.
To help users find the ISB standards they need, search filters have been developed. These enable users to see what has been approved by the ISB and what is forthcoming.
Users can select using the search filters to narrow down the results that are displayed, or leave all the filters unchecked to see the entire list.
When refining a search, there are three ways to narrow the selection: by ISB Decision, by Standard Types and by Standards Categories. More information about these choices is available below:
ISB Decisions
- Approved means that the standard is approved by the ISB. Approved standards are initially given “Recommended” status, where trials are encouraged. After implementation experience (and possible refinement in the light of experience) they are approved with “Adopted” status where adoption is strongly advocated.
- Future means it will be developed in due course.
- Rejected means it was considered and rejected by the ISB. Reasons for rejection are included in the details of the proposal, to avoid repetition.
- Under consideration are standards that will be presented to the ISB once further work on them has been completed.
Standard Types
- Business Data Standards (BDSs) relate to specific areas of the data model describing the data that underpins ESCS business. They are defined in response to a business need, captured in a business case. As they are developed every effort is made to ensure that the Business Data Standard is capable of supporting all the ESCS business needs for the same data. BDSs define information semantics and structure in a logical way that ensures that any binding to an encoding (such as XML or CSV) will always convey the same meaning.
- Controlled vocabularies support the Business Data Standards and can take the form of flat controlled lists which provide a set of approved formatting and values to be used across the ESCS. They might also be hierarchical thesauri which contain relationships between terms; or authority files which relate specifically to names, subjects and series and can contain cross references. Once approved all of these types are independent ISB Standards in their own right.
- Guidance Documents are issued to support ISB Standards, or give details of the ISB’s direction.
- Technical Data Standards specify an encoding schema (or “binding”) for data exchange. Technical Data Standards will conform to ESCS ISB Business Data Standards.
Standards Categories
- These allow filtering by subject area.
- Users can select the subjects that best match what they are looking for.