Abstract:

With its 31 faculties and 11 scientific research institutes, with almost 90 000 students and 7 000 professors, researchers and teaching associates, University of Belgrade is one of the largest and oldest universities in Western Balkan currently adopting Bologna Process. It is state-owned university, with its units distributed all over the city of Belgrade. Since early seventies, many attempts were made to implement software support for data integration and centralized management of some processes at the University. However, its units were developing independently for almost a century, resulting in diverse system, with some faculties such as the School of Electrical Engineering and the School of Mathematics, which have developed sophisticated proprietary information systems based on Web services, while some other member institutions lack in elementary information support and still predominantly maintain documentation in paper form.
Analysis of information processing at all member institutions started with questioners where institutions had to declare which groups of data were maintained in electronic form. Twenty groups of data were identified, among which are the most important: teachers, their contacts, titles and degrees, references, projects, supervision of postgraduate students, study programs, courses, curriculum and teachers engaged, students, their grades, obligations, enrolments, legal documents, management bodies, issued diplomas etc. By ranking information support it was found that 18% of IT solutions were fully operational and based on modern technologies, while almost the same number of institutions had no IT support, except data kept in MS Office documents. The majority (64% of institutions) had some moderate IT support, often with different software systems for processing student data and separate system for employee data management. The technology used for information system development vary from the latest versions of Oracle to PHP and MySQL, MS Access, Clarion, dBase and Clipper.
The strategy adopted by the university was to provide interoperability by periodical data exchange between member institutions and university information system, based on XML, on daily basis. The highest priority goals are to provide up to date information on the university Web site, as well as to issue common diplomas with diploma supplement for all member institutions. Technologies chosen for the development of university information system, which is still under construction, are Java and PostgreSQL.
In the mean time, the IT support team of the University was faced to some urgent short-term requests to provide data for accreditation process. In order to collect data from all member institutions, specific forms with validations were developed in MS Excel, and they were processed and input into the database using parsers written in Java and Apache POI library. The current state of IT support on the university level greatly depends on the availability of data from the common database: some data were generated by exchange with member information systems based on Web services, while other data was generated by parsing electronic forms. The paper will provide detailed analyses of this process, predominant data sources for each group of data, problems in information system development based on technical, social and organizational factors, and directions for future development.

Keywords:

University, information system, database, Java, electronic forms.