Lack of Transparency. Commercial alignment services have their place in providing expert resource alignments. What is often lacking is a transparent relationship with official standards organizations. CASE, as a standard, builds in that transparency in that each unique identifier is actually a public webpage that presents the content of the framework or item identified. CASE Network provides a public website for establishing that resolvability universally.
Limiting Licensing. IMS has focused on removing the barriers created by commercial licenses by seeking to preserve the unique identifiers for the issuing organization across their edtech suppliers. This is critically important for districts seeking to build digital ecosystems in terms of ensuring the efficiency and efficacy of their work.
Cost Savings. By providing a free service for issuers and suppliers, IMS seeks to remove the cost constraints inherent with relying on commercial services, especially as edtech moves into the Big Data / API economy when creating and storing vast amounts of data long-term, tagged commercial identifiers, is not financially feasible.
It should be noted that the commercial services are welcome to register and consume the CASE Network materials at no cost like any supplier.
