The Portuguese iAP Services Platform as a Building Block for User’s

Centric Information Systems

The Case of the Higher Education Institutions

Arsénio Reis

, Jorge Borges

, Paulo Martins

and João Barroso

INESC TEC and University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal

University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal

Keywords: Information Management, Information Systems, Performance Evaluation, Software Engineering, Higher

Education Institutions, iAP.

Abstract: Higher education is a complex business including very different process. At its core are the teaching and

research processes and along the edge of the business model are the administrative processes, targeted to the

students and alumni. Some of these processes translate into services that must be available during the whole

life of the users and the institutions. For example, a higher education institution is expected to issue diplomas

during the whole lifetime of its former students. In this context, we’ve been working in order to use the current

e-government infrastructure of electronic services as building blocks for some of the features of the higher

education institution electronic services. This work proposes the adoption of a set of those services. We’ve

concluded a successful testing stage and expect to deploy a full production system very soon.

1 INTRODUCTION

In this works we explore the usage of the Portuguese

national public administration interoperability

framework and services (iAP) as a building block to

support the development of the information system

(IS) of a higher education institution(HEI).

1.1 Higher Education

Higher education has a very specific business model,

as it provides a public service of education and

research, while keeping an extensive autonomy from

the public administration rules and hierarchy. In fact,

HEI are fully autonomous in regard to their IS

implementation, software solutions and providers.

Another distinctive issue is the market size for HEI,

which is small, when compared with other economic

sectors, e.g., logistics, health (Ramos et al, 2017;

Santos et al, 2014), commutations, etc, creating a

sustainability barrier for the software suppliers to

develops specific solutions to such market. For these

reasons, some HEI use software systems adapted

from other markets, e.g., financial management,

procurement, human resources management, etc, and

develop other solutions specific to the HEI processes,

e.g., student management, scientific documents

management, etc. (Reis et al, 2013; Reis et al, 2017;

Borges et al, 2017).

The HEI have the responsibility to provide some

services for an unlimited time, mostly related to the

certification of the former students’ academic

achievements. On a typical scenario, previously to the

electronic services, a former student would access the

HEI academic bureau to request a certificate, and the

bureau staff would access the HEI archives and

produce the certificate according to the information

retrieved from those archives. With the introduction

of electronic services and electronic documents, the

student management progressed in a similar manner

to the customer relationship management (CRM) on

other sectors, and the students’ related processes are

now fully supported by digital systems. Considering

the “forever” time frame and the ongoing

technological evolution and uncertainty, there are

some issues to be address, e.g., how to authenticate

the former students, or how to send them documents.

These problems are common to all the public

administration services, which deals with citizens

older then the digital era, and might be solved by

using public joint solutions.

270

Reis, A., Borges, J., Martins, P. and Barroso, J.

The Portuguese iAP Services Platform as a Building Block for User’s Centric Information Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0006807802700274

In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018), pages 270-274

ISBN: 978-989-758-298-1

Other sectors, namely the national health care has

successfully created user services, composed by

several cooperating systems (Rocha et al, 2017; Reis

et al, 2016).

1.2 e-Government

The Portuguese government has developed an e-

government program since the early nineties,

encompassing several initiatives, including:

development of broadband infrastructures; electronic

access to the public services; and services

digitalization. This has been a global trend for states

and governments to develop a new form of relation

with their citizens (Montargil et al, 2017; Esperança,

2016). For this purpose, a specific governmental

agency was created – the Agency for the

Administrative modernization (AMA), which

coordinates the major modernization initiatives. Two

major products of these initiatives are the Portuguese

national citizen card (CD) (Cartão de Cidadão, 2017)

and the citizens web portal (PC) (AMA, 2017; Portal

do Cidadão, 2017). The CD is an id card that every

citizen must hold, which includes the citizen

identification numbers for civil identification, social

security identification, financial identification, and

health identification. The CD, illustrated in figure 1,

also has a chip, containing electronic certificates that

provide electronic signature and authentication

features. Recently is was also included a mobile

device association, granting mobile based

authentication (Almarabeh, T., & AbuAli, A., 2010;

Cartão de Cidadão, 2017; Gupta, M. P., & Jana, D.,

2003).

Figure 1: The Portuguese Citizen Card (source:

https://www.autenticacao.gov.pt/o-cartao-de-cidadao).

The PC is a web portal on which the public

administration services are provided and includes

several other features useful for the citizens

relationship with the national administration (Mateus,

2008).

1.3 Interoperability in the Public

Administration

The success of the implementation of the e-

government paradigm is greatly dependent of the

ability of the public administration services to

interoperate between themselves, in order to

seemingly provide meaningful services to the citizen,

according to a well perceived model, e.g., life events.

This paradigm is being exhaustively revisited and

updated on other works related to artificial agents that

act on the user behalf (Reis et al, 2017a; Reis et al,

2017b; Reis et al, 2017c; Paulino et al, 2017).

To further address the interoperability issue, the

AMA has created the iAP – the interoperability in the

public administration, which is a central services

platform devoted to provide the public administration

with a tool for systems interoperability (iAP, 2017).

The iAP’s main objective is to make available the

necessary shared tools for systems interconnection,

identity federation, authentication providing,

messaging, payments, etc. With these tools, it should

be possible to compose and deploy multichannel

electronic services, clearly aligned with the citizens

and companies needs, in an agile and economic way.

So, included in the iAP are seven services:

(i) Integration platform, providing the

features for the creation of transversal

electronic services;

(ii) Authentication provider, which can be

used to authenticate users with the CD;

(iii) Payment platform, which provides

electronic payments features for

different access channels;

(iv) Short messages (SMS) gateway, which

allows the secure exchange of SMS

messages with the citizens and the public

administration departments.

(v) Qualified Electronic Signature using the

CD;

(vi) Professional attributes alongside with

the electronic signature;

(vii) A Personal Citizen folder for document

in the citizen web portal.

2 A PROPOSAL FOR HIGHER

EDUCATION

In this work we developed a proposal towards the

usage of the iAP services by the HEI. We identify a

set of electronic services for which the iAP could

The Portuguese iAP Services Platform as a Building Block for User’s Centric Information Systems

271

contribute as a building block and that have an

administrative nature.

a. HEI Services and iAP Services

The HEI services to use iAP are:

 Student registration;

 Student and alumni authentication;

 Payments of administrative fees;

 General contacts;

 Certificates electronic signature;

 Document sharing.

The services should use iAP as follows in the next

subsections and resumed in table 1.

Table 1: HEI and iAP Services.

HEI services

iAP

Student registration

Integration platform

Authentication provider

Student and alumni

authentication

Authentication provider

Payment of

Administrative Fees

Payment platform

General Contacts

Integration platform

Electronic Signing of

Academic Certificates

Citizen card

(qualified electronic signature

using the CD;

professional attributes

alongside with the electronic

signature)

Document Sharing

Integration platform

(personal documents folder)

i. Student Registration

Regular students’ registration occurs at the beginning

of the academic year and it is a very important

mandatory service for the first-year students, who

don’t have credentials from the HEI nor have a

previous knowledge about the electronic systems to

make their online registration. A good option would

be to have the registration process publicized and

available on the Citizen Portal (PC), so a student can

use a well-known platform – the PC – with a secure

and reliable authentication method as well as a well-

known electronic address. This service would use the

iAP’s integration platform to provide and integrate

the registration system in the PC’s services catalogue,

as well as the iAP’s authentication provider to

authenticate the user and forward its id to the

registration system.

ii. Student and Alumni Authentication

For the current era students, the authentication from

iAP can be provided as an alternative, secure and

reliable method of authentication. For the alumni,

who don’t have an electronic id issued by the HEI, or

just don’t remember their credentials from times

when they were students at the HEI, the usage of the

authentication from iAP is a very good option, as they

can gain access to the HEI services platform using

their citizens credentials as they do with other public

administration services.

iii. Payments of Administrative Fees

The students are subjected to several types of

payments, including the tuition fees and other

administrative fees, e.g., diploma issuing. The usage

of the iAP payment platform is advantageous for the

students because it provides a well-known method, as

well as for the HEI because it comes with the service

assurance of the Portuguese public administration on

several regards, e.g., security, legal compliance, well-

known interface, etc.

iv. General Contacts

The general contacts of the HEI can be integrated on

the PC catalogue, so the HEI can be searched for and

found as any other public administration department.

The HEI can be contacted directly from the CP. It is

used the iAP integration platform feature.

v. Electronic Signing of Academic

Certificates

The academic certificates issued by the HEI can

issued as electronic documents and electronically

signed by the proper responsible using the citizen

card, which has a particular feature for an HEI’s staff

member to digitally sign a document including his

personal id and his professional role at the HEI. It is

a very important iAP’s feature, as the HEI has

immediate access to a reliable nationally deployed

infrastructure of personal digital certificates. All the

documents from the HEI can be digitally signed and

their authenticity verified using the iAP.

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272

vi. Document Sharing

As part of the integration platform, the iAP provides

a personal documents folder for each citizen so the

public administration can store the documents issued

to the citizen. The HEI can use that personal folder to

store the students and alumni personal documents,

e.g, diploma, certificates, etc. The student can then

use the folder to share the documents with other

departments of the public administration as needed.

3 IMPLEMENTATION

This work’s approach to the usage of iAP on the HEI

is being implemented by the University of Trás-os-

Montes e Alto Douro. The implementation work is

part of the OO@UTAD project, financed by the

Agência da Modernização Administrativa (AMA).

The preliminary technological tests have been

successfully executed and the full production will

soon be available.

4 CONCLUSION

This approach introduces the usage of e-government

infrastructures by HEI, on which the administrative

processes are treated in the context of the relationship

of the citizens with their country’s public

administration. Particularly for alumni or future

students, the approach simplifies their interaction

with the HEI, as they use the same tools and process

that they use with other public administration

services. For the HEI it provides a reliable set of

services and infrastructure, with a life cycle properly

assured by the government. We have successfully

tested the software and the feasibility of the concept.

Only with the production deployment it will be

possible to evaluated other issues related to the

acceptance and usage of the iAP services as well as to

the management of the life cycle of the systems using

iAP.

5 FUTURE WORK

At the current stage, the future work will be a

production deployment. There is a particular care, on

which we are currently working, which is related to

the maintenance of the HEI’s systems life cycle

without interference from the iAP services life cycles.

It will be developed a software abstraction layer,

acting as a stub for the iAP services, so the HEI

systems can be independently managed.

The assessment of the users’ experience will be very

important to access the true success of the approach.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by Project “SAMA

OO@UTAD”, number: 021970, operation code:

POCI-02-0550-FEDER-021970, financed by the

Program COMPETE 2020, Portugal 2020.

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