Benefits

There are many educational applications and systems in the market today.  Thanks to the work of organizations like IMS Global, many of these can represent their data using a variety of standards ranging from those for content packaging, questions and tests to those for metadata and identity.  These "data representation" standards allow data to be migrated from one system to another.  Most educational applications also work with various standardized protocols such as SOAP, Z39.50, SRW, POP and IMAP.  These allow systems to communicate with each other and exchange content in real time.

The O.K.I. open service interface definitions (OSIDs) seek to standardize interfaces to basic functionality so that one application (an OSID consumer) can access specific data and functionality from another application (an OSID provider) in real time.  For example, a digital asset management system  can make its collections of assets accessible to a learning management system (LMS) by exposing an implementation of the Repository OSID.  The LMS then need only be able to consume that OSID (i.e. be able to call functions in the digital asset management system as defined by the OSID).