Towards a Unified University Information System: Bridging the Gap of Data Interoperability

Orobor Anderson Ise^1,

¹Information and Communication Technology Unit, Federal University of Petroleum Resources Effurun, Delta State, Nigeria

Cite this paper:
Orobor Anderson Ise. Towards a Unified University Information System: Bridging the Gap of Data Interoperability. American Journal of Software Engineering. 2014; 2(2):26-32. doi: 10.12691/ajse-2-2-3

Abstract

As the need for universities to securely and timely share data with the National Universities Commission (NUC) becomes more imperative, NUC had introduced the Nigeria University System Management Portal (NUSMAP) that act primarily as a data collection portal from all the universities. The portal enables universities to upload students, academic and non-academic staff, and other related data to it. The process involves manual data collection through vast disparate information systems which makes it highly people dependent and susceptible to delay, inconsistency, redundancy and erroneous data entry / uploading. This research work however, suggests that adoption of interoperable framework will be a better approach to such unification. It therefore proposed a framework based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will enable disparate information systems used in universities to interact and seamlessly share data securely between themselves, NUC and other private/public agencies. It also hoped that it will act as a spring board for researchers from agencies, industries and academia to start advocating standardization of common education data as well as adoption of interoperable framework in educational sector. This will ensure conformance to standardize data exchange in Nigerian universities as educational practice and technology are rapidly changing from print to digital.

Keywords:
interoperability SOA standard Unified Universities NUC web service

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