Contents of the ASN

• Achievement Content Standards Repository (ACSR) includes over 713 learning standards documents for K-12 education as promulgated by departments of education in each of the United States plus standards from nationally recognized content groups.
• Web Services Interfaces, protocols and agents that connect various classes of users to the content and functionality of the ACSR.
• Research and Development on best practices and recommendations for representing content and skill standards within metadata records and educational systems.

Functions of the ASN

• Standards Development Application assists standards bodies in developing well structured standards by providing a Web-based standards authoring environment.  Developed originally for SETDA, the development application is available to ASN member organizations maintaining standards within the ASN.
• Standards Repository Application manages the ACSR data store of state, national, and international standards as well as the interface to the standards development application.  The Standards Repository Application also handles the processes associated with batch download of RDF/XML standards documents under license by third-party publishers, intermediaries and other service providers.
• Metadata Generation Interface (in development) provides the means through Web Services for third-party metadata generation tools to interact with the ACSR supporting searching and browsing and the assigning of ASN unique statement identifiers (URIs) to local metadata records.
• ASN URI Resolver Application dereferences a state or national ASN standard URI embedded in a metadata record to the full-text of the URIs associated ASN taxon path.
• State Resolver Application manages the SOAP services that accepts an ASN URI and a state unique identifier and returns the taxon paths for the designated state standards that have been mapped to the ASN URI.

Maintenance and Updates

• The ASN XML license includes XML files of standards, current on the effective date of the license. Periodic updates to the standards occur on quarterly basis and optionally more frequently based on JES & Co.'s own discretion via Web Download.
• All files distributed by the ASN are encoded in RDF/XML. Standards in ASN version 1.2 represent restructured and refined data from the Align to Achieve (A2A) Version 1.0 files to more accurately reflect the structure and content of the official standards documents.
• Standards expressed in the Version 1.0 (XML) format are being updated to Version 1.2 (RDF/XML) format. Upon update to Version 1.2, Version 1.0 file distributions will be discontinued.