Service Oriented Architecture – Collaborative educational framework Dr. R.Kamatchi1

1. Assistant Professor , K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai, kamatchi@somaiya.edu.

Abstract — The Service orientation with the educational institutions is a boon to the existing conventional model.There are many advantages which can be measured under the parameters like reusability, resource sharing, time, cost etc. The implementation of SOA may also arise various security issues like privacy, availability etc. The study in this paper analyses and highlights the dynamics of SOA implementation. It is an empirical analysis which adopts a case study method to understand the implication issues of Service Oriented Architecture with the Educational Information system.

Keywords— Service Oriented Architecture, Modeler, Process choreography.

I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays many innovative practices have been implemented in educational systems all around the world. The virtual learning, e learning are the well known examples for the same. As the service utilization increases among the organizations, the importance of SOA has tremendously increased. There are several services, which can be kept common with in the educational institutions like the library, projects, placement services etc. This will avoid un-necessary duplication of the same / similar databases at multiple locations.

II. METHODOLOGY This paper is adopting an exploratory method under which the case study tool is used to perform the analysis. This paper is suggesting a model and the same is tested with the data received from the educational institutions. The similar model is also further extended with a detailed SOAD designs.

III. EDUCATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

The educational system proposed in this research is based on service oriented approach. Using web services technology the consumers and the providers can circulate

the educational contents in the form of different services such as learning object repository , digital library, placements, virtual classrooms, virtual labs, authoring services etc. The user can add as many as services by adding their own web service layer. A) ESS components: This ESS (Educational Service System) will be containing the following segments:

1) Web client 2) Educational Server

a) Educational Service Centre b) Educational Service Providers c) UDDI

The web clients are the service consumers. The service consumers may vary from the students, teachers, parents to placement agencies. For example the students query to access the books from the e-library will be forwarded to the educational server which will then be directed to the service registry. The part of the keyword will be considered for the search and the e-bookaccess service will identify the content and distribute the same to the users through the interface. The interfaces can also be called as a web brokers who will enable the core character of SOA- Interoperability. The interfaces will help the different consumers to communicate from their own setup to a different application setup. The educational server utilizes and manages the distributed educational resources. This contains three components.

1. Server registration 2. User registration& profile updating 3. Content discovery

1. Service registration: When a new service is created by the service providers then it should be registered with the service registry and the invoking descriptions will be updated by using WSDL (Web Service Description Language). This will make the service to be available from anywhere to multiple service consumers. This can be invoked based on the consumer’s

request. 2. User registration and profile updating: This enables the users to have access with the services available through the network. Before invoking any service from the registry, the user should register his profile and update the same during the subsequent access. 3. Content Discovery: This carries the consumers query and searches the same from the registry. The service will be identified from the registry and can be invoked from the corresponding service provider.

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The above mentioned architecture can be connected with the public server using the internet application protocols like HTML, XML, and SOAP etc. B) Advantages: 1. Loose coupling: The services can be developed and published independently. In the same way the services can be invoked and implemented by any service consumers from anywhere. For example course material writing is a particular service which can be developed and loaded onto the web server. This service can be utilized by any course writer and the corresponding content developed by them will be loaded into the database supported by this architecture. This kind of independent development, registration of services is increasing the loose coupling among the services. Even though the loose coupling improves the quality and the reusability of web services, this is also makes the specified architecture susceptible to wide range of security issues. The security problem related to loose coupling has two folds. The new services developed are not only completely open – no one owns them. Web services developed by an organization enable the creation of reusable code, simplify development and streamline system integration. While these goals are met, the open standards emerged have standards that enable the transmission and description of data and procedure calls between systems. However, none of these open standards contain any inherent security aspects of their own. The web services were designed to be able to move efficiently through firewalls. This very loose coupling actually decreases their usability in this regard. 2. Common Interface: Another core advantage of SOA is its common interface which can also be termed as a middleware. The interface is a piece of software, optionally running on its own hardware that interprets and retransmits messages travelling between two computers operating in a distributed manner. The interface must process eachrequest for information twice, once on its way from the requesting computer to the source of information and then again on its way back. The middleware basically depends on the following parameters: 1) The service that is required to be exchanged 2) The consumers who are in need of the data 3) The transfer facility that is to be used [1] In the proposed EIS the interface will help the educational service providers to extend the services to various consumers irrespective of their platform and resources. The implementation of SOA technology with educational system is basically lagging because of the technical updates that need to be performed with the legacy system. With the help of interfaces the consumers can have the access to the services without the barriers of the platforms and the application support.

IV. SOA DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT The implementation of SOA with the educational system needs a systematic development pattern. Now the OOAD models are slightly modified and adopted as a service oriented analysis and design (SOAD).This SOA approach

is also strongly reinforcing well- established, general software architecture principles such as information hiding, modularization and separation of concern. Moreover to the same it is also including the service composition, service repositories and middleware models which are also playing an important role within the overall architecture. This design emphasizes on the flexibility, agility and the availability of the services to the environment. [2] A) Components: The SOA solutions are composed of reusable services as a completed package with its definitions and functionalities and published with the standard interfaces. It is also allowing the integration of legacy system without much complexity. Operations: Transactions represent single logical units of work (LUWs). Execution of an operation will typically cause one or more persistent data records to be read, written, or modified. SOA operations are directly comparable to object-oriented (OO) methods. They have a specific, structured interface, and return structured responses. Just as for methods, the execution of a specific operation might involve invocation of additional operations. Services: Represent logical groupings of operations. For example, if we view merit list as a service, then, list by choices, list based on percentage and save data for individual departments represent the associated operations. Business Processes: A long running set of actions or activities performed with a specific business goals in mind. Business processes typically encompass multiple service invocations. Examples of business processes are: Examination, placement, Purchase etc.

In SOA terms, a business process consists of a series of operations which are executed in an ordered sequence according to a set of business rules. The sequencing, selection, and execution of operations are termed as service or process choreography. Typically, choreographed services are invoked in order to respond to the business process.

V. PROCESS CHOREOGRAPHY

The process choreography helps the developer to assign the services to various processes and defining the way the processes are related to each other by means of services assignment. This is a design which helps the user to prepare a complete architecture of an application with proper assignment of individual elements. This is similar to a flowchart which will help the programmer to understand the flow of operation and give a blueprint of the entire process. As the Software design model helps the user to understand the development architecture, the Service Oriented Design model can be assisted by this choreography.

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The SOAD contains the following basic components:

� Service categorization and aggregation � Policies and aspects � Meet-in-the-middle (Processes ) � Semantic brokering � Service harvesting and knowledge brokering

(Interface).

The services are prepared and published independently. The services are complete in nature and executing in a loosely coupled manner. The service orchestration explains the way how the individual services are performing in a particular process. The choreography of a process will explain the way how the services will be performing collaboratively to achieve the output of a particular process. The following diagram will explain the simple process choreography of four different processes examination, library, and placement agencies. The services may be created by different service providers independently and the entry will be published with the registry. But in a single process , all these different services will be invoked

and work together to perform the specified set of operations. The specification for the collaboration and individual access will be available with the WSDL file attached with each and every service. Initial process will accept the input from the user and forward the output as an input to the next service. In this way the entire process cycle will proceed and perform the related operations.

VI. EIS MODEL DESIGN

A) List of Services: The following are the important services identified to be feasible with the Educational Information System (EIS):

B) Process definition:

Certain Services are consumed by more than one process and all these processes will become a part of a single application. The users of our system can be a part of a Community of Interest (COI). The members of the COI are normally related by a geographic area, by an administrative domain, or to a set of predefined tasks. [3]In this EIS the members are associated by a set of predefined tasks, educational information handling.

Each and every service is composed of different set of operations within itself. These operations help the service definition part as simple and more accurate. The following diagrams explain the sample set of operations for the services defined in this section. In the similar way, the entire EIS architecture can be defined in detail.

C) Operations listing:

In the above mentioned way each and every service contains a set of operations which are to be performed in a sequential order. Other than this service contains policies, security parameters and performance criterion as WSDL extensions. Policy: The policy describes the legal aspects of the services which need to be considered during the choreography of the processes. This is much useful with the service governance process.

List of services Description1.Fee collection Fee collection under

various heads 2. Form collection Collecting different set of

forms

3. Form verification Verifying forms for various conditions

4. Merit list preparation Preparing candidate list based on merit

5. Enrolment Taking admission in a course and enrolment number allotment

6. Eligibility verification Checking various norms and conditions

7. Seating arrangement Number allotment based on courses

8. Mark list preparation Mark sheet preparation

9. Reverification Revaluation during discrepancies in marks

10. Attendance Daily attendance

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Security parameters: These security parameters specify the various security aspects of the services like privacy, authenticity, confidentiality etc which needs to be considered during the compatibility verification. These security parameters can be classified in different ways. Performance parameters: The performance parameters are explaining the performance assurance provided by each and every service. The performance parameters are attached with the Service Level Agreement which can be considered by the modeller while selecting a particular service for the user requirement specification. Once the services are defined all these parameters are also defined and bundled together with the services inside the WSDL document. The requirement specification done by the users can be compared against these parameters for the choreography. The orchestration process makes the choreography of various processes feasible by providing an interface through which the application differences can be resolved and smooth process choreography can be performed. The overall architecture can be organized in the following way.

VII. FINDINGS

1. The implementation of Service Oriented Architecture with the educational institutions helps the reusability of the services created by a single creator to many service consumers.

2. This enhances knowledge sharing and provides a good knowledge base for the multiple users.

3. This provides a central service repository from where the different request specifications can be analyzed and serviced.

4. The whole process choreography provides the understanding of Service Oriented System development model as meet-in-middle structure.

5. It provides a single service repository and enables the different user access to the similar services.

VIII. COMPLETE PROCESS CHOREOGRAPHY

IX. CONCLUSION

The study proves that the Service Oriented Architecture with the educational institutions will increase the reusability by which the maximum data sharing can be achieved. The complete leverage of the information will enhance the backbone of the existing Educational Information System. This is bringing a new dimension to the teaching learning environment and changes the whole educational process easy and collaborative.

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