Overview

About the xAPI Profile Server Authoring Guide

This document provides the reader context for the use of the xAPI Profile Server as an authoring support for developing xAPI Profiles. In addition to providing services to validate that a .json-ld xAPI Profile is conforming to the xAPI Profiles specification and generally making hosted xAPI Profiles and lookup available, the xAPI Profile Server is an authoring tool for profiles, guiding users with best practices designed into the workflow to help authors produce strong xAPI Profiles.

This document is written with the following assumptions about its reader:

• The reader has a ready and working knowledge of the xAPI specification.
• The reader has a ready and working knowledge of the xAPI Profiles Specification
• The reader has a ready and working knowledge of why and how one authors an xAPI Profile.

While this document does not propose a specific pedagogy, methodology or ideological framing for the development of an xAPI Profile, it does provide context, the authors' principles made explicit, and practical implementation considerations for authoring xAPI Profiles given that framing.

The xAPI Profile Server Library

With the release of the xAPI Profile Server, a number of documents in the xAPI Profile Server Library will be helpful in different ways.

• The xAPI Profile Server User Guide provides a comprehensive set of step-by-step walk-throughs detailing end-user features of the xAPI Profile Server.
• The xAPI Profile Server Administrator Guide provides focused step-by-step walk-throughs for managing an xAPI Profile Server instance.
• This document, the xAPI Profile Server Authoring Guide, documents initial recommended practices in using the xAPI Profile Server to develop xAPI Profiles.

How to Read This Document

The xAPI Profile Server Authoring Guide is organized by areas of anticipated needs for xAPI Profile Authors. Methodology is important to establish so deliberate, transparent decisions can be accounted for in periodic evaluation of the program's success, and Authoring Guidance that aims to reduce, if not eliminate, technical and semantic interoperability challenges in the near and long term.

This document places information referenced within the xAPI Profile Server User Guide into more practical guidance to author xAPI Profiles. At the risk of competing information sources, any step-by-step instructions are described in the xAPI Profile Server User Guide. This document references such instructions directly to the page and heading of accompanying documents.

Where distinctions in the aims of authoring an xAPI Profile demonstrate considerations for exceptions, this document will attempt to illustrate the differences and, where it matters, offer a preference for what is considered best practice at the time of publication.