Tips For Using the Common Core XML

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been out for a couple of years now and adoption efforts are progressing. To facilitate use of the CCSS in learning applications and with metadata frameworks like LRMI, they have recently posted canonical identifiers and machine-readable XML for the standards. I wrote about that in a recent post.

Update: 1 September 2014
The CCSSO has updated the CoreStandards.org website and most of the links in this post no longer work. However, the Common Core XML files still exist and can be found with the developer information here. Sometime in the near future, I'll re-write this post to describe the new provisions that the CCSSO has made for the techie crowd.

Today I'm going into the nuts and bolts of how a developer can make use of the XML. There are some useful features that aren't obvious at first glance. For background, I recommend that you read the announcement memo that accompanied the release of the XML on the corestandards.org website.

Canonical Identifiers

The canonical identifiers for the common core state standards are available in .csv form here: http://corestandards.org/assets/E0607_ccss_identifiers.csv. The first column lists the URLs that were formerly on the Corestandards.org website. They are included to support conversions for legacy applications.

Notable is there is an exact 1:1 mapping between the three ID types and there are 1844 IDs in the table. So if two applications are using different forms of IDs (e.g. one uses GUIDs and another uses URIs) the translation is a deterministic table lookup. A closer examination will show that there's a simple algorithmic conversion between the "dot notation" identifiers and the corresponding URIs. I've written functions in c# to do the translation and posted them here. It should be easy to port them to Java or any other language.

Hierarchy

The standards for Mathematics and ELA/Literacy follow different hierarchies that are suited to the way the standards are written and are intended to be used. The Dot Notation and URL forms of the identifiers can be parsed into the corresponding hierarchies as shown in the following examples.

Math Example

Dot Notation: CCSS.Math.Content.HSA-SSE.A.1b
URL: http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A/1/b

Initiative	CCSS	(Common Core State Standards)
Framework	Math
Set	Content	(Options are 'Content' and 'Practice')
Grade	HSA	(High School Algebra)
Domain	SSE	(Seeing Structure in Expressions)
Cluster	A
Standard	1
Component	b

You can reference the math standards at the Component, Standard and Cluster levels. Thus, the following are all valid CCSS URI Identifiers:

• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A/1/b
• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A/1
• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A

If you add an ".xml" suffix to the URL then you get the computer-readable XML version of each:

• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A/1/b.xml
• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A/1.xml
• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE/A.xml

The XML at the cluster and standard levels includes all child items. So the cluster includes all standards in that cluster and all components within that standard.

While the canonical IDs don't include Domain or Grade levels, you can retrieve all standards within a domain or grade by hacking the URL as follows:

• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/SSE.xml
• http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA.xml

And, you can retrieve all of the math standards in one XML document with this URL:

• http://corestandards.org/Math.xml

ELA/Literacy Example

Dot Notation: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3d
URL: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10/3/d

Initiative	CCSS	(Common Core State Standards)
Framework	ELA-Literacy
Set		(Optional, not used in this example)
Strand+Domain	W	(Writing)
Grade	9-10
Standard	3
Component	d

You can reference the literacy standards at the Component, Standard and Grade levels. Thus, the following are all valid CCSS URI Identifiers:

• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10/3/d
• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10/3
• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10

If you add an ".xml" suffix to the URL then you get the computer-readable XML version of each:

• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10/3/d.xml
• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10/3.xml
• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/9-10.xml

And, you can retrieve all of the ELA/Literacy standards in one XML document with this URL:

• http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy.xml