Design, Implementation and Operation of an Intranet-based University-Information-Management-System
Isidor Kamrat, Andreas Passler, Boris Rohrbacher, Franz Haselbacher · World Conference on WWW and Internet · 1999
Most of the running university-information-management-systems are suffering from the lack of an up-to-date and well-designed data-model that includes all types of resources (personel, inventory, rooms, lectures, research-activities,...) and their relations between them. We have tried to set up such a data-model from scratch. As user-interface to that model we have designed an intranet-based application, that includes personal identification, the granting of functions to persons and the appointment of functions to specific program-modules that operate on different resources. This application-system can be operated without central management. Outsourcing or not We did an evaluation on outsourcing the whole systems design and implementation and came to the result that the costs for outsourcing are immense high. There are a only a few companies in Europe that offer commercial university-information-management-systems. There are still many constraints typical for austrian universities that cannot be parameterized in the systems and therefore have to be programmed additionally which makes the systems even more expensive. At the end we decided that the design and the implementation should be done inhouse. The Entity-Relationship(E/R)-Model The design of the E/R-model started from scratch. The whole E/R-model consists mainly of six sub-E/R-models with base-entities representing the base-resources, and the relations between them (see figure). The knowledge on the E/R-model gives the opportunity to act and react very flexible to requirements from the university by changing or adding entities, relations and their proper applications. Figure 1: Entity/Relationship-model The Application-Model The application-model is designed in a very generic way, so it can be adapted to every universities needs. It consists of five embedded layers: organistion person room inventory lecture researchactivity