JES & Co. Supports Education Publishers’ Efforts with Free Access to State and National Achievement Standards

Tucson, AZ, October 20, 2008 --(PR.com)-- Responding to publishers’ cry for easy access to the states’ ever-changing educational standards, JES & Co., a leading non-profit research and development organization, announces that access to their database of more than 350,000 standards is now free for commercial and non-commercial use. Delivered in an open, well documented format, publishers, assessment providers and researchers can now be assured that their products and services meet state mandated objectives and can be aligned to our country’s educational goals articulated by the states. The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is comprised of a database of all of the United States’ K-12 academic standards, web services that provide consistent programmatic access to the database, global unique identifiers that facilitate “positive” identification of each academic statement, a resolution service that transforms the unique identifiers into text, and a community of users committed to sharing best practices around open access and use of academic objectives. The ASN has been funded by the National Science Foundation to enable academic standard correlation information to be added to the descriptions of the millions of resources that make up the National Science Digital Library.

Diny Golder, the Executive Director of JES & Co. points out, “The ASN is a national asset, that for the first time in the US’s history enables our large distributed state education system to be serviced economically and with confidence by both large and small publishers. The ASN has done for education what the interstate highway system did for travel. Publishers, assessment companies and researchers can easy cross state lines yet still meet each individual state’s needs.” Through extensive research of international standards efforts including Dublin Core, IMS, GEM, and IEEE, JES & Co. has developed and contributed to the global education effort the “standard” for collecting and disseminating learning and testing objectives. Delivered in a well documented RDF/XML format, the standards data is not only easy to use in cataloging and research systems but also supports discovery of “resources by standards” on the Semantic Web.

For more information on how your organization can access the Achievement Standards Network, email Bruce Walker at brucew@jesandco.org or visit their site at www.AchievementStandards.Org.

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