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Architecture & standards
As an institution, you want to support your target group in the best possible way. To do this, your information management needs to be in good order. Working with architecture & standards helps with this. With a shared architecture, we help our members towards a common information strategy. Using sector-wide standards facilitates the exchange of information between institutions.

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Standards

Educational institutions cannot do without an optimal exchange of information. Standards are pre-eminently the means to establish this exchange and to ensure central registration and coordination. Within cooporation, we agree on the form in which the information is provided.

Advantages of standards

Using standards offers many opportunities. The improved exchange possibilities allow you to store information once and use it several times. For example, students only need to register centrally once. The central administration then exchanges their data with the decentralised systems at the faculties. Because agreements about the form of the information are made beforehand, no extra processing is needed to read this data into another system. Avoiding this processing step saves time, money and errors.

Findability of materials

Standards are not only found in business management. Making agreements is also important in education and research. This involves sharing and making available educational resources, test banks and research results. By standardising the materials with keywords (metadata) and unique identification codes, they can be found on the Internet.

Edustandaard

That is why SURF encourages the use of standards. In collaboration with Kennisnet, we manage standards for the entire education chain in Edustandaard. Edustandaard involves open standards and agreements on how (inter)national open standards should be applied in the Netherlands. Currently, we focus on standards in the field of:

  • tests
  • teaching materials
  • personal data
  • educational information
  • research results

SURF and (open) standards

SURF is also committed to standards in other ways. For instance, Floor Jas holds a seat at the Standardisation Forum. SURF also deposits the open standards it develops at global forums.