Activity: A type of Object making up the "this" in "I did this"; it is something with which an Actor interacted. It can be a unit of instruction, experience, or performance that is to be tracked in meaningful combination with a Verb. Interpretation of Activity is broad, meaning that Activities can even be tangible objects such as a chair (real or virtual). In the Statement "Anna tried a cake recipe", the recipe constitutes the Activity in terms of the xAPI Statement. Other examples of Activities include a book, an e-learning course, a hike, or a meeting.
Activity Provider (AP): Now referred to as a Learning Record Provider. This change differentiates that the activity itself is not always the responsibility of software, rather just the tracking portion is.
Actor: An individual or group representation tracked using Statements performing an action within an Activity. Is the "I" in "I did this".
Application Programming Interface (API): A set of rules and standards created to allow access into a software application or tool.
Authentication: The concept of verifying identity. Authentication allows interactions between two "trusted" parties.
Authorization: The affordance of permissions based on role; the process of making one party "trusted" by another.
Client: Refers to any entity that might interact through requests. Some examples could be a Learning Record Provider, a Learning Record Consumer, a Learning Record Store (LRS), or a Learning Management System (LMS).
Community of Practice (CoP): A group of practitioners connected by a common cause, role or purpose, which operates in a common modality. CoPs are focused on implementing xAPI within a specific knowledge domain or use case. CoPs or independent developers, can create domain-specific vocabularies, profiles, and recipes. These practices usually involve work around defining use cases and curating the various vocabulary terms, synonyms, and other related metadata that might be preferred within a CoP. They can also reuse existing vocabularies, profiles, and recipes already published by other CoPs or participants of the xAPI community.
Document Profile Resource: A construct where information about the learner or activity is kept, typically in name/document pairs that have meaning to an instructional system component. Not to be confused with Profile.
Endpoint: An entry point in a service-oriented-architecture. xAPI mirrors this approach with Document Profile Resources by defining the IRI from which communication takes place as an endpoint.
Experience API (xAPI): The collection of rules articulated in this document which determines how learning experiences are defined, formatted, and exchanged so that independent software programs can exchange and make use of this information.
Immutable: Adjective used to describe things which cannot be changed. With some exceptions, Statements in the xAPI are immutable. This helps to ensure that when Statements are shared between LRSs, multiple copies of the Statement remain the same. Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI): A unique identifier which could be an IRL. Used to identify an object such as a verb, activity or activity type. Unlike URIs, IRIs can contain some characters outside of the ASCII character set in order to support international languages. IRIs always include a scheme. This is not a requirement of this standard, but part of the definition of IRIs, per RFC 3987. What are sometimes called "relative IRIs" are not IRIs.
Internationalized Resource Locator (IRL): In the context of this document, an IRL is an IRI that when translated into a URI (per the IRI to URI rules), is a URL.
Inverse Functional Identifier (IFI): An identifier which is unique to a particular persona or Group.
Learning Experience: An event associated with learning. It is highly diverse as far as what it can be. Examples include reading a book, taking an online course, going on a field trip, engaging in self-directed research, or receiving a certificate for a completed course.
Learning Management System (LMS): A software package used to administer one or more courses to one or more learners. An LMS is typically a web-based system that allows learners to authenticate themselves, register for courses, complete courses and take assessments (Learning Systems Architecture Lab definition). An LMS in this document is used as an example of how a user is identified as "trusted" within a system and able to access its Learning Experiences.
Learning Record: An account of a learning experience that is formatted according to the rules of xAPI. A Learning Record takes on many forms, including Statements, documents, and their parts. This definition is intended to be all-inclusive.
Learning Record Consumer (LRC): An xAPI Client that accesses data from Learning Record Store(s) with the intent of processing the data, including interpretation, analysis, translation, dissemination, and aggregation.
Learning Record Provider (LRP): An xAPI Client that sends data to Learning Record Store(s). Often, the Learning Record Provider creates Learning Records while monitoring a learner as a part of a Learning Experience.
Learning Record Store (LRS): A server (i.e. system capable of receiving and processing web requests) that is responsible for receiving, storing, and providing access to Learning Records.
Metadata Consumer: A person, organization, software program or other thing that seeks to determine the meaning represented by an IRI used within this specification and/or retrieves metadata about an IRI. An LRS might or might not be a metadata consumer.
Metadata Provider: A person, organization, software program or other thing that coins IRIs to be used within this specification and/or hosts metadata about an IRI.
Persona: A set of one or more representations which defines an Actor uniquely. Conceptually, this is like having a "home email" and a "work email". Both are the same person, but have different data, associations, etc.
Profile: A specific set of rules and documentation for implementing xAPI in a particular context. A profile provides a way to talk about vocabulary concepts, statement templates, and patterns for xAPI data. Not to be confused with Document Profile Resource.
Registration: An instance of an Actor experiencing a particular Activity.
Representational State Transfer (REST): An architecture for designing networked web services. It relies on HTTP methods and uses current web best practices.
Service: A software component responsible for one or more aspects of the distributed learning process.
Statement: A data structure showing evidence for any sort of experience or event which is to be tracked in xAPI as a Learning Record. A set of several Statements, each representing an event in time, might be used to track complete details about a learning experience.
Verb: Is the action being done by the Actor within the Activity within a Statement. A Verb represents the "did" in "I did this".