Embarking service-oriented architecture into student information systems

• Main Authors: Yasin, Azman, Ibrahim, Huda, Harun, Nur Hidayat
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Utara Malaysia 2013
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/14353/1/finalReport.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/14353/; http://lintas.uum.edu.my:8080/elmu/index.jsp?module=webopac-l&action=fullDisplayRetriever.jsp&szMaterialNo=0000793041
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

Most organizations have more than one information system (IS) for their data and activity management. In Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), the Computer Centre is responsible for various IS related to students.However, none of these systems are fully interoperable in heterogeneous IS because they are using different types of database and programming language. This causes difficulties to automatically integrate data in the heterogeneous IS.As a result, the person in charge at each IS needs to do manual selections to get data from other IS. Consequently, the same tasks will be repeated since they have to enter and re enter similar data into different IS.In addition, this situation is increased the operation and maintenance cost, and waste the data storage space caused by the redundancy of data. Even though UUM has an IS that uses an integration tool for updating required data from the main student IS, it is still unable to update concurrent data on real-time and it needs one tool installed for each two IS to be integrated.This study aims to propose a conceptual model of the heterogeneous IS integration based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept.A case study approach was applied involving student IS in UUM because IS in a university are large, distributed and quite difficult to involve the whole IS with very limited time and cost.In validating the proposed conceptual model, this study uses experimental of prototyping and experts review. With the finding and result of this study, it is expected to produce a valid conceptual model of student IS based on SOA concept.Further, the model could serve as a guideline to related organizations in adopting SOA concept in improving the management of their IS integration.