Standard

The ECA documentation is divided into four sub-sections: Stories, Services, Interfaces and Infrastructure. The sub-sections’ documentation has been written from the different operators’ perspectives and always in accordance with its intended purpose.

Documentation is written in English.

The stories are the lightest level descriptions of the purpose of the system and its functions - from the user's perspective. They begin from setting objectives. Who and what type are our users, and which user problem are we solving. The stories also answer questions, what are the users’ motivators for their operations, in what type of environment and in with what type of stakeholder service or system it will be used.

Stories describe all the relevant information, on which basis the desired user experience and functionality for the service can be planned. A story does not, however, describe a single service as such, but instead provides the user a visible ensemble with the different services and the relations necessary between them.

The service documentation describes the actual service’s functionality and structure. To support this, the standard includes a reference implementation, which can be used to test the standard’s reasonableness.

In the open source reference implementation, the services and necessary interfaces are maintained in accordance with the documentation. It works as support for different operators as they build their actual services. The standard does not require the services to be implemented in the same way as the reference implementation. The source code and other materials have been published with a license that allows free use, so if you wish, you may utilise them as the basis of your own service products.

The interfaces allow for ensembles that are built out of several services, which are pleasant and seamless for users to use. With the help of the interfaces, the services can communicate with each other and exchange information, in which case the compatible services can serve the users better.

A cutting-edge user experience is achieved with sufficiently uniform practices from one service to another. You can help achieve this by following the service design guidelines when creating your own service.

The documentation defines the services and the connections between them. Each service can operate independently and be produced by different operators. There can also be several with the documentation. In the documentation, the services’ and interfaces’ names are intentionally general and they do not take a position on a specific technology. Each box in the picture does not necessarily have to be a separate service.

On the right-hand side, in the image above, there are the components in accordance with the user details and centralised login solution’s definition. There may be several login services (Auth Source) and the login options they provide are available to all other services via a proxy (Auth Proxy) through one interface. The users can manage the login services they are using

via the management service (Auth Connector). There may be several user data sources (Auth Data Source) and the user data provided by them is available to other services via an interface provided by a centralised user data service (Auth Data).

In the image above, on the left within the dotted lines, there are the most important and most visible services for the user. Through the store service (Bazaar) users can obtain materials produced by all content providers (CMS) to use in other services (LMS). The terms CMS and LMS may be confusing, but they simply refer to the producer and the consumer. Services that produce anything and services that provide the user an opportunity to consume anything. The documentation does not take a more precise stand of what the two could be. In addition to these, there is a collective service (Recipes) which enables material to be compiled and discussed.

In the image above, at the bottom, there are Meta services, which collect and transmit (Meta Data) as well as analyse (Meta Analyzer) users’ activities.