The Portfolio InterOperability Projects (PIOP) partners have been working hard on our LEAP2A spec for portfolio interoperability and portability, and at our meeting last week we ironed out some of the last things necessary to agree a good working specification, able to represent just about any information that is in common use in more than one e-portfolio system. The spec just allows for export/download and import/upload so far, rather than web services, but that will come later.

The spec has been developed with and by developers for developers, so it is relatively easy to implement, being based on Atom. Several people working on e-portfolio-related projects were at the JISC e-Learning Programme meeting yesterday (at Aston) and there was plenty of positive and encouraging comment around.

Anyone interested is very welcome to comment on where we have got to, and send me suggestions for improvement so that any other relevant system dealing with similar information can have the appropriate information also represented in LEAP2A, to enable interoperability with the rest of our established partners.