INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Thomas Kudrass

Dept. of Computer Science, Mathematics and Natural Science, HTWK Leipzig (University of Applied Sciences),

Gustav-Freytag-Str. 42 a, Leipzig, Germany

Keywords: Information System, Integration, Web Service, E-Learning.

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the integration of heterogeneous databases with the example of a university

information system, based on previous experiences in the implementation of some components. The paper

stresses the new opportunities for universities resulting from database integration. We outline the target

architecture for an integrated information system whose principle is the coupling of existing systems and the

definition of global views on them. The services defined on those views can be used for high-level

information services in the web or for the definition of workflows in the university administration.

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Motivation

The convergence of heterogeneous software and the

integration of legacy applications characterize the

development of today’s information systems, which

raises the question of interoperability. Examples are

health care information systems comprising many

components, convergence trends regarding ERP and

office applications (e.g., the Mendocino project of

SAP and Microsoft), enterprise content management

(ECM) systems that include functionality of

document and content management. The

development of highly integrated university infor-

mation systems (UIS) is the subject of this paper.

Related work can also be found in (Bischof, 2005).

A university information system has to provide

information about research and scientific

cooperation offers, education and further education

capabilities. The usage of information technology at

German universities is characterized by historically

grown system platforms, little integration and an

incomplete support of business processes in the

university administration. IT systems implement

mainly tasks that are specific to certain

organizations.

The ongoing reforms of higher education and the

adoption of bachelor/master degrees affect the

further development of university software. New

systems are introduced such as e-learning systems,

digital libraries, course evaluation software and

other proprietary developments. At the same time,

vendors of commercial university software enhance

the offered functionality to keep pace with the

requirements. The need for integration stems from

increasing requirements to combine data throughout

the whole university or department and to extract

information for the university management.

1.2 Example E-Learning

The usage of an e-learning platform causes more

integration problems. Without connections to the

administrative software, it implies additional costs as

an isolated application, particularly for manual

reconciliation of data. The acceptability decreases,

the long-term and sustainable usage of an e-learning

system is unlikely. Therefore, an e-learning platform

requires the integration with administrative software

without substituting it. The organization of the

education can profit from the introduction of self-

service functions.

The aim is an e-learning platform that resembles

a portal providing access to all relevant information

at a central point. The system must provide

ubiquitous services, e.g., checking the admission to

an examination or the publication of examination

results. A major problem is the existence of different

identities that are maintained in separated isolated

systems. The tighter integration of administration

and lectures is the base for a lot of innovations. The

assessment of education (course offerings, number

208

Kudrass T. (2006).

INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterpr ise Information Systems - DISI, pages 208-214

DOI: 10.5220/0002466102080214

 SciTePress

of participants, evaluation results) can have an

impact on the allocation of resources. The

strengthening of extension studies requires the

inclusion of financial aspects in the systems. The

infrastructure has to be ready to provide new

services for the students, such as smartcards or

information services over the internet.

The potential for innovation in education regards

the publication and distribution of teaching material

that, in some cases, may be authored by students

themselves. The extension of the information

services may include theses and reports, e.g., from

internships abroad, which may replace the

conventional archiving of that material. The usage of

digital libraries and content management systems

requires the connection to administrative systems as

well. The electronic publication of the knowledge

assets sketched above may help fostering the

cooperation of universities.

The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 has

given a general introduction and a motivating

example. In section 2, we discuss requirements to

integrated systems from the perspective of the

university. Section 3 introduces the most important

components of a distributed information system as

they can be found in our university. Section 4

sketches the main concepts of system integration. In

section 5, we discuss architectural choices for inte-

grated systems and present the target system design.

Finally, section 6 summarizes with conclusions and

gives an outlook on the project HIM.

2 REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS

The target architecture of IT applications follows the

concept of enterprise resource planning (ERP). It

tries to represent the business process flow in the

departments of a company by an integrated

approach. When considering a university as a

business, we can distinguish between two separate

areas: the production comprises research and

education, the administration addresses the office

and accompanying functionality.

Figure 1 represents the relevant user classes.

According to customer relationship management

(CRM), we use the term student relationship

management (SRM) or employee relationship mana-

gement (ERM) because of many similarities with

CRM. Besides, there are interfaces outside the

university, e.g., with cooperation partners, compa-

nies offering jobs and internships. In those cases the

exchange of services is bilateral. A management

information system (MIS) needs data in an

integrated and aggregated manner for decision

makers, university management and supervisory

authorities. Data are exchanged among all

components of such a system (Information Mana-

gement), which requires a suitable infrastructure.

Figure 1: Users and components of a university

information system (UIS).

2.1 Use Case: E-Learning

An e-learning platform mainly addresses the

education – not the research. The example of e-

learning proves the necessity of integrating all

subsystems. The integration comprises three aspects:

 cooperation with information and administration

systems of the university

 coupling to existing authoring systems

 integration of digital libraries or content management

systems

Today’s e-learning systems include some admi-

nistrative functions as they are known from conven-

tional software, e.g., the enrollment in a course. Yet,

such a system is not capable to consider all the

examination regulations and additional restrictions.

Without connecting to administrative systems, the

online-registration is not failure-free and may result

in manual corrections of the enrollment lists.

An e-learning system will not evolve into a

platform that fully supports all business processes of

administration. The leading German system is HIS

customized to the needs of German university

administrations (HIS, 2005). There are other soft-

ware systems that implement important subtasks.

E-learning systems provide functions to edit

teaching material (mainly HTML), but do not

achieve the functionality of a general editor or

special editor tools. That causes a special need for

interoperability that encompasses the support of

INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

209

numerous formats and the treatment of metadata.

Besides describing the content of the course, the

metadata are related to data in other administration

systems for education. So there is a big potential for

the re-use of teaching material in digital libraries.

Data formats and protocols are already known, e.g.,

Z39.50 (Oldenettel, 2003).

2.2 Requirements to an Integrated

University Information System

Communication

An integrated university information system must

improve the communication between students and

teaching stuff. An added value results from the

definition of groups for different purposes, e.g., the

list of participants of a course. There are two

different communication mechanisms: active notifi-

cation (push) or the publication of information

(pull). Services are primarily provided via internet.

Self-Service Functionality

We have to define services that encapsulate the

implementation of administrative functions. An

example is the online-enrollment that can be

implemented in different ways: by using the HIS

module QIS-POS, by attaching to an e-learning

system, or by a proprietary development. Most

important is that the interface exhibits always the

same behavior with a syntactic definition that is

platform-independent (in an XML format).

Content Management and Publishing

The integration of a digital library or the coupling to

a document management system opens new ways to

provide more digital information. Among them are

theses or experience reports from internships.

An important part of the information services

offered to students is the presentation of the

university calendar beyond the class schedule. That

is required in many formats, e.g., in a brochure

(PDF) or embedded into an e-learning platform.

Indeed, current standard university software

provides the generation of HTML output from the

managed data but this is restricted to the underlying

data model, which excludes a further customization

to more individual requirements considering data

distributed on different systems.

Reporting and Statistics

The reporting can also benefit from the integration

of information, e.g., the education reports required

by the supervisory authority of the Saxon state

government, or the individual annual reports by the

professors on the teaching load. The role of report-

ing will increase by shifting competencies from the

ministry downwards to the universities in the mid-

term future. Thus, the envisioned reporting services

are the foundation of a management information

system (MIS) used by the university management.

The introduction of performance-oriented payment

of staff requires the inclusion of evaluation results

that has to be joined with other education data.

Information Extraction from

Heterogeneous Data Sources

The composition of a timetable individual for every

student is an example how new information can be

generated by combining two different systems. The

students that participate in a course are maintained

in the system HIS, the course schedules are managed

in another system, S-PLUS (Scientia, 2005). The

coexistence of both systems with some overlapping

data originates from historical reasons, since they

have been installed at different times. When joining

data of both systems, personalized schedules can be

created in a format flexible enough to support

different output channels.

Data Security and Privacy

The creation of a security infrastructure is a funda-

mental prerequisite to grant access to existing appli-

cation systems to the public. This includes following

tasks: a central user management, classification and

grouping of users to assign certain privileges. User

groups can be: faculty members, course participants,

professors, and alumni. The implementation may be

based on directory services such as LDAP. When

creating user groups we have to decide how far

additional categorization can be used in single

systems. For example, an e-learning system may

provide the classification of users according to their

proficiency level to personalize the content. Thus,

the definition of general user groups as they are

relevant in different business processes cannot cover

all aspects of single systems, which is obvious in e-

learning systems.

A crucial issue of authorization throughout all

applications is the introduction of an identity mana-

gement solution (e.g., IBM Tivoli Identity Mana-

gement). The purpose is the implementation of a

single-sign-on access to all services of the univer-

sity. An important identity management process is

the user provisioning, i.e., maintenance and mana-

gement of user information. The automation of the

ICEIS 2006 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

210

user life cycle, the creation of accounts in separate

systems and the delegation of administrative tasks to

subsystems are parts of that process.

Much of the data (e.g., results of examinations or

evaluations) are private data and are, therefore, sub-

ject of the Data Protection Act. The design of a

university information system has to consider that

issue by the definition and enforcement of

appropriate access control rules. Some information

can be published in the internet without restrictions.

Maintenance of Partnerships

Besides students and employee of the university,

other partners such as research partners or coope-

rating companies have to be involved in the infor-

mation system. Therefore, the database has to be

enhanced by addresses and information for alumni.

3 IT SYSTEM ENVIRONMENT

AT THE SAMPLE UNIVERSITY

3.1 Administrative Systems

The sample university sketched below is the home

university of the author, the Leipzig University of

Applied Sciences (HTWK Leipzig). The main

administrative functionality is covered by HIS

(Hochschul Information System), a commercial

software system widespread at German universities

(HIS, 2005). HIS comprises several modules:

management of students (SOS), examinations

(POS), admission processes (ZUL), self-services

(QIS), reporting (LSF), and statistics (ISY). Besides

HIS, the system S-PLUS is applied for course

scheduling, which includes publication of class

schedules. Both systems manage overlapping data,

i.e., course data. The schedules managed by S-PLUS

apply only to whole classes of students. The infor-

mation about enrollments are not available in S-

PLUS. Individual timetables for students can only be

derived by global joins of the data of HIS and S-

PLUS. Both systems lack interfaces to the academic

part of the university.

Beyond that, there are various local systems at

some departments. For example, the system PLANet

(Planning via Net) manages data that are prepared

for the input into S-PLUS. PLANet is based on

XML database technology and supports the flexible

presentation of data in different formats. Another

enrollment system supports the organization of

general-education offerings.

3.2 New Applications

The e-learning system being developed is called

LIPS and is based on two platforms: the Zope Object

Database ZODB (Zope, 2005) manages course data

and implements some administrative functions such

as online-enrollment. A second component is an

authoring system on top of another database. Both

subsystems require data reconciliation.

The evaluation of courses is required by law.

Therefore, the system ELEVA has been purchased

in cooperation with other universities (CEC, 2005).

The web pages of the departments are often

manually maintained with no database support.

Another project aims at storing all graduation

theses in a digital library in order to exploit their

market potential. The chosen platform is the open

source system MyCoRe (Lützenkirchen, 2002).

The so-called Digiboard has been developed for

publishing news and announcements in the web,

comparable to a conventional blackboard.

The usage of smartcard technology is primarily

aimed at providing standard services of the admini-

stration office as self-service functions. Among them

are drawing up certificates or the return notifications

at the beginning of each term.

4 INTEGRATION OF

HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEMS

The use of an integration solution has several goals:

 Maintenance of global data consistency facing

redundant data storages

 One-time data input into the primary data source

 Reduction of manual activities

 Combination of data to implement new functions

(e.g., generation of education reports or individual

timetables)

In order to enable the cooperation of

heterogeneous applications an additional software

layer, called middleware, is needed. Messages or

events are exchanged among systems to integrate

data or functions. Those ideas are continued in the

enterprise application integration (EAI) approach

(Linthicum, 1999), i.e., independent applications are

loosely coupled via middleware. The middleware

layer establishes connections to existing applications

using adaptors or connectors, converts different data

formats, maps schemas and supports the data ex-

change among different applications (routing,

queuing, transaction management).

INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

211

Besides, the concept information integration is in

use. Unlike EAI, the basic idea of information

integration is the federation of data in a virtual

distributed database that can also include data of

commercial application systems such as SAP. That

development is driven by important vendors, e.g.,

IBM (Deßloch, 2003). Information integration fol-

lows the approach of multidatabases (Sheth, 1990).

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is an

integration approach at enterprise level and provides

a basis for the implementation of portals or analy-

tical applications. Unlike EII, EAI uses an event-

driven data exchange mechanism without

dominating direction. Integration requires a common

understanding about the data shared by different

users. In that context, ontology-based products such

as the Enterprise Information Integrator of Software

AG are notable (Software AG, 2005).

Different integration levels can be defined: user

interface integration, data integration, function

integration, and process integration. The data

integration is very common because relational

databases are the platform of the systems to be

integrated.

When integrating heterogeneous systems, we can

distinguish between loosely and tightly coupling.

The loose integration presupposes the definition of

intervals for the data exchange among systems. The

transfer of data can be facilitated by defining appro-

priate data formats in XML, whereas the transfor-

mation can be performed using XSLT. The problem

of the loose coupling is that the modification of data

is propagated in a deferred way. This may result in

consistency problems when different systems try to

modify the same data.

Tight integration means that the systems are per-

manently coupled. Data are exchanged among com-

monly used database tables. The reconciliation effort

is only possible within systems of the same vendor.

5 SYSTEM DESIGN

5.1 EAI Architectures

The application-to-application integration (A2A) is

the traditional and simplest type of integration, a

point-to-point connection between two applications.

The single systems communicate directly and use a

large number of protocols and formats, which results

in a network with “spaghetti architecture” (Pezzini,

2003). Instead, two different EAI architectures

compete on the market: hub & spoke and bus

architecture. The systems do not interact directly but

they send messages via a bus or broker.

The bus architecture is based on the so-called

publish & subscribe principle: Information produced

in an application is sent to a central bus (publish)

and propagated to other applications connected to

the bus (subscribe). There is no central server that

coordinates the distribution of single messages. The

central bus merely forwards the messages to the

subscribers. The bus architecture is applied in

scenarios where a single system produces data for

lots of consumers or vice-versa. Thus, the main

emphasis is on the distribution of identical mass

data. Accordingly, the application potential is many-

sided, mainly in data-oriented integration.

The so-called hub & spoke architecture provides,

contrary to the bus architecture, a central informa-

tion hub that connects all applications and systems

the same way. This central information hub manages

the whole data traffic among several systems. The

underlying business rules are represented as

workflows managed by the hub, which favors a

process-oriented procedure. So the hub manages

both the business process and the technical

integration rules. Implementing hub & spoke

systems is easier because of a strict separation of

system-specific connectors and business-oriented

workflows. Therefore, such architectures are most

suitable in a dynamic infrastructure environment –

better than bus architectures. For that reason, they

are used in complex data dispatching scenarios, for

example in business processes that run over several

applications. The only weak point is the position of

the central hub as potential bottleneck.

From the point of view of university systems the

hub & spoke architecture appears more adequate for

different integration scenarios. An implementation

of that architecture is the Data Hub (Oracle, 2005).

5.2 Process Analysis

The analysis of business processes requires

identifying the primary data sources. These are the

information systems of the university administration

and the departments that are responsible for the

administrative processes. Data relevant for an e-

learning system, a web content management system

or metadata for digital libraries can be extracted

from those databases. The definition of business

processes presupposes the description of the

organization of the university in order to identify

roles (actors) that are primarily responsible for

dedicated data.

ICEIS 2006 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

212

We choose the ARIS toolset (Davis, 2001) for

modeling. ARIS is well suited for the holistic

description of a company and can be applied for

universities as well. It classifies the overall system

into different views: organization, data, function,

process. Thus, the ARIS concept provides a general

framework for business process modeling that is

expressed by several methodologies. Among them

the event-driven process chain (EPC) is the most

popular method. It enables the modeling of the

process view that is also responsible for the inte-

gration of the other views. Data transfer processes

among heterogeneous systems can be modeled as

well.

5.3 Service-Oriented Architecture

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an archi-

tectural concept that describes the provision of

business services and functionality in terms of

services (Erl, 2004). A service is a system resource

that can be requested through a standard interface.

Complex business processes can be implemented by

combining service calls (orchestration). The

business logic is not located in a single program but

distributed among several autonomous services. A

SOA can be implemented with any service-based

technology based on SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. A

service can encapsulate the data access in a standard

manner. This reduces the redundancy and contri-

butes to a modular development of university

systems. Business logic in existing applications must

be re-implemented to services by the development of

appropriate adaptors.

A similar service approach has been used in the

CAMPUS information system (Bischof, 2005) to

integrate an e-learning system.

5.4 Architecture of the Target

System

The future university information system appears as

an enterprise service bus (ESB) providing services to

different types of clients (Chappell, 2004). Those

services can be used in specific applications. The

physical location of the data is transparent to the

service users. Internally, several subsystems are

loosely coupled in a hub & spoke architecture. That

requires the definition of a so-called common view

(CV) on the hub. The spokes realize the mapping of

each local application view (AV) to the common

view. The data exchange between the hub and the

local applications is based on XML. Note that most

of the applications (e.g., HIS) do not provide a data

export in XML format. An important task of data

exchange is the definition of XML document

standards for the university administration, as they

have become quite common in many other e-

government applications.

Figure 2: Target system architecture.

Figure 2 exemplifies the envisioned integration

of four administrative systems of the university.

Other systems could be added in the near future, for

example the course evaluation tool. We recommend

an incremental integration approach, i.e. other

systems may join the federation later. The provided

content services can be used as building blocks for

the development of individual web applications.

Those applications may be customized to the needs

of specific departments. The use of the content

services ensures the consistent presentation and

utilization of data. Moreover, such services are the

basis for an improved reporting required by

university management. The services can also be

viewed as process steps in workflows specified in

BPEL.

6 CONCLUSIONS & OUTLOOK

The analysis of the current state of heterogeneous IT

systems of a university presented in this paper is the

starting point for a long-term development towards

an integrated system. Therefore, we started the

project HIM (Hochschul Information Management)

to deal with the overall information infrastructure of

the university. The avoidance of point-to-point

integration as it has been discussed in the previous

section is not contrary to the incremental approach

we strongly recommend.

We do a prototype implementation to validate

our ideas with the example of the “Virtual Internship

Office”. The task of the office is to support the

students to find internships in regional companies

and to supervise their successful completion. The

INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

213

“Virtual Internship Office” requires an overall view

on several databases that have to be integrated as

sketched above. The prototype system requires the

research of aspects of autonomy and semantic

heterogeneity. Besides, the implementation has to

prove the feasibility of the workflow technology in

an office environment.

An important task is the definition of document

standards as foundation of data exchange and for

service interface specifications. For that purpose we

aim at cooperation with other universities.

Future work to establish an IT infrastructure of

the university has also an impact on the education in

the information systems course, since the principles

of complex information systems and the integration

strategy can be demonstrated with a realistic

example. For that purpose, we have to face both

technical and interpersonal issues, since integration

of systems of different organization raises some

concerns that have to be alleviated.

REFERENCES

Bischof, C., Gebhardt, M., Steves, P., 2005. The

Integrated CAMPUS Information System: Bridging the

Gap between Administrative and E-Learning Proces-

ses. 11

EUNIS Conference.

CEC GmbH, 2005. www.eleva.de.

Chappell, D.A., 2004. Enterprise Service Bus, O’Reilly &

Associates.

Davis, R., 2001, Business Process Modelling with ARIS,

Springer Verlag UK.

Deßloch, S, Maier, A.; Mattos, N.; Wolfson, D.,

Information Integration – Goals and Challenges, 2003.

In Datenbank-Spektrum 6, (June 2003), dpunkt-Verlag.

Erl,T., 2004. Service-Oriented Architecture, Prentice Hall.

HIS GmbH, 2005. www.his.de..

Linthicum, D.S., 1999. Enterprise Application Integration,

Addison Wesley.

Lützenkirchen, F., 2002. MyCoRe – Ein Open Source

System zum Aufbau digitaler Bibliotheken (in Geman),

In Datenbank-Spektrum 4, (2002), dpunkt-Verlag.

Oldenettel, F., Malachinski, M., Reil, D., 2003. Integrating

Digital Libraries into Learning, In Proceedings of the

2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Rice

University Houston, Tx.

Oracle 2005. www.oracle.com/data_hub..

Pezzini, M., 2003. Application Integration Scenario:

Making It All Work Together, Gartner European

Symposium ITxpo, Florence/Italy, March 2003.

Scientia GmbH, 2005. www.scientia.de.

Sheth, A.P. and Larson, J.A., 1990. Federated Database

Systems for Managing Distributed, Heterogeneous, and

Autonomous Systems. In ACM Comp. Surveys 22, 3

(1990).

Software AG, 2005. Enterprise Information Integrator,

Retrieved Nov. 2005 from www1.softwareag.com/

Corporate/Solutions/integration.

Zope, 2005. Website for the Zope Community,

www.zope.org.

ICEIS 2006 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

214