INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN COMPUTING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY An International online open access peer reviewed journal Research Article ISSN 2277 9140 ABSTRACT An e-college Time table Retrieval System Based on Service Oriented Architecture A.Parkavi Assistant Professor, M.S.Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore-54 parkavi@yahoo.com doi:10.6088/ijacit.12. 13003 A large system like e-college time table retrieval systems with web accesses are difficult to develop due to their complex and immobility nature. The Service oriented architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of such systems by supporting modular design, application integration and inter operation and software reuse. With open standards, such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, the SOA supports interoperability between services operating on different platforms and between applications implemented in different programming languages. An e-college time table retrieval model that uses the service oriented architecture as a basis for designing, implementing, deploying, invoking and managing college services is described in this paper. The e-college time table retrieval model that is developed in this paper provides support for staffs, HODs, Principal, Directors and other societies interested in e-college time table retrieval systems, as well as for students. This system provides the facility for coordinator to enter the time table or change the time table and the staffs to access the time table using their PDAs or by using their smart phones. They can get the alerts about their duties over the mobiles and exchanging of duties can also be done using the mobile devices with the help of web services. Multimedia input and output, with text, images and speech, make the system more user friendly than existing e-college time table systems. Keywords: e-college, time table retrieval system, service oriented architecture, web services. 1. Introduction College time table system has so many important things to maintain like subjects, classes, timings, duration, students info and faculty details. It makes user that all the resources, man power and facilities don t clash with each other and are utilized to their maximum levels. In the present system, the departmental and college level courses time tables are maintained separately apart from the examination invigilation time tables. And the cocoordinators of the time tables use the auto generation tools for time table s generation or manually they do the time tables whenever it is needed. Staffs or authorized persons can access the time tables using their desktops connected to internet. There is no interface provided to access the time tables using the mobiles or PDAs in a friendly manner. To provide the genuine web services which can be accessible through the desktops, mobile or PDA devices, a model is suggested in this paper. Using the SOA this software can be built using the integration of sub systems and the enabling of workflows and data flows with integration of loosely coupled components. 2. E-college time table retrieval model The e-college time table retrieval system developed in this paper is based on the Service oriented architecture and uses web services. A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of principles and methodologies for designing Received on May 2012, Published on July 2012 260
and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components (discrete pieces of code and/or data structures) that can be reused for different purposes. SOA design principles are used during the phases of systems development and integration. SOA generally provides a way for consumers of services, such as web-based applications, to be aware of available SOA-based services. For example, several disparate departments within a company may develop and deploy SOA services in different implementation languages; their respective clients will benefit from a welldefined interface to access them. XML is often used for interfacing with SOA services.soa defines how to integrate widely disparate applications for a Web-based environment and uses multiple implementation platforms. Rather than defining an API, SOA defines the interface in terms of protocols and functionality. An endpoint is the entry point for such a SOA implementation. Service-orientation requires loose coupling of services with operating systems and other technologies that underlie applications. SOA separates functions into distinct units, or services, which developers make accessible over a network in order to allow users to combine and reuse them in the production of applications. These services and their corresponding consumers communicate with each other by passing data in a well-defined, shared format, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services. For these reasons, the SOA is an appropriate model for developing a e-college time table retrieval system consists of three layers. The top layer provides the web services interfaces. The bottom layer contains the e-college time table retrieval services. The services co coordinator within the middle layer controls the flow of messages in the system from the web services interfaces to the e-college time table services and vice versa. Security and privacy are particularly important issues for college time table information. They are confidential so access to such information must be restricted to authenticated and authorized users. Secure transmission of such information must be complemented with secure storage of the data. The use of SOA is critical for enforcing such polices. Figure 1: e-college time table retrieval system The e-college time table retrieval model is designed with these security and privacy issues in mind. Users of the system are authenticated and session information is kept with logging of service calls. Resources in the system are attached to the resource creator, and privileged users can view/modify the data in the system. For applications deployed on devices like DPAs, authentication and session management are strictly enforced. 3. College time table retrieval services The services of this e-college time table retrieval system are provided by a staff module and time table module. The system also provides user interfaces for staffs, principals, HOD s, coordinators, directors and other authorized societies linked with college. The devices accessing these modules can be desktop or server computers and PDAs or smart cell phones. A.Parkavi 261
3.1 Time table module This module exposes two interfaces, a web server and a web service, for the co-coordinators of events. Coordinators are authorized by HODs. The web server interface is intended for users who prefer to use a web browser to access the college time table services. The web service interface can be used by humans or devices to communicate with the web services to access the data. 3.1.1 Avoiding the clashes in time tables with all the other technical activities The time table module provides support for routine activities of allocating the schedule for a staff to teach the course, conduction of any special classes, conduction of any seminars, attending the seminars or presenting the seminars outside the college or attending any technical activities outside the college. All these schedules will be entered into the scheduled time table of the individual staff to avoid the clash of any departmental examination invigilation or college level examination invigilation duties. All these things will be done with the storage of data using any DBMS at the back end. 3.1.2. Interfaces The coordinator mentioned above can use the web server interface to access the e-college time table retrieval system using a browser from a desktop or a smart phone or a PDA. He can use the PDA to enter/alter/retrieve information about the time table of a staff working in that college from anywhere using the web service provided by the time table web server. Even the university activities can also be entered in to the schedule of college in corporate with college activities by a person who is keeping track of the university activities. The user of a PDA with a small keyboard makes it difficult for the coordinator to input information about the time table schedule of staff or a department. Consequently, in addition to the graphical interface, this model proposes a PDA with speech recognition software that allows the physician to enter/retrieve information by speaking. The speech technologies ease the task of the coordinator in completing tasks and encourages the use of PDA. 3.2 Staff Module The web server interface allows the staffs to access the e-college time table retrieval system using a browser in their desktop or by using their PDA or by using their smart phones. The staff module provides services to the staff. 3.2.1 Getting alert about duties on mobile The staff module keeps record of staffs information retrieved from the web server. And gives alert to the staff during their classes and examination invigilation duties before the time specified by the staff. This service can be offered to the staff based on their request. If they want to disable this alert facility they can do it. 3.2.2 Getting help for exchange of duties on mobile in emergency In emergency any staff wants to exchange duty, he can get the information about the staff availability over the phone relevantly from the web server. And the request for exchange can be made over the mobile itself and it will be send to the web server and forwarded to the respective staffs who are preferable by the staff or by the system automatically. Once if the exchange is accepted by any staff, immediately the information will be conveyed to the respective officials PDAs respectively for better management. Removing human intervention from the communication between the staff and other staffs for exchanging the duties, and maintaining the information electronically, reduces the possibility of human errors. A.Parkavi 262
4. Softwares for implementation 4. 1 Web Services Figure 2: e-college time table retrieval model Java language can be used to its ability to be deployed on small wireless devices as well as on powerful server computers. Apache Axix2 framework can be used for the web services to get the facility of reliable messaging, co-ordination, atomic transaction, security policy, trust, secure conversation and addressing of web services. 4.2 Using Speech recognition & synthesis software To make the user to interact with the e-college time table retrieval system using voice interaction manner, Dyna Speak can be sued. DynaSpeak is a small footprint, high accuracy speaker independent speech recognition engine that scales from embedded to large scale system use in industrial, consumer, and military products and systems. The DynaSpeak engine can be ported to a variety of processor/operating system configurations, giving flexibility in product design. DynaSpeak supports both finite state grammars - used in more traditional command and control style applications - and statistical language models - used in more advanced natural language style dialog applications. Dynaspeak provides the benefits of Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech recognizer, Continuous speech, user speaks naturally,dynamic grammar compilation, Speaker independent, Speaker adaptation. The coordinator and the staffs can interact with the system using the Dyna speak to give their entries in to the departmental and college level time tables. For this the finite state grammar or a free form grammar can be fed into DynaSpeak. Natural Voices speech synthesis engine can be sued to produce natural sounding device to human voice interaction. Natural voices support many languages, male and female voices and voicexml standard. So voicexml format messages can be accepted. A.Parkavi 263
4.3 RSS/Atom Web feeds are used to share recent entries' headlines, full text, and even attached multimedia files. Atom and other web syndication formats are now used for many purposes involving periodic updates or publications. A feed reader or "aggregator" program can be used to check feeds and display new articles. Client-side readers may also be designed as standalone programs or as extensions to existing programs like web browsers. Browsers are moving toward integrated feed reader functions. Atom, on the other hand, provides a mechanism to explicitly and unambiguously label the type of content being provided by the entry, and allows for a broad variety of payload types including plain text, XML external content such as documents, video, audio streams, and so forth. The offline entries and changes from coordinator PDA can be updated the specified time intervals using Atom/RSS feeds. 5. Conclusion In This paper I have presented an e-college time table retrieval system that uses the Service Oriented Architecture as a basis for designing, implementing, deploying, managing and invoking e-college time table services. Multimedia input and output, particularly graphics and speech, makes the system seem less computer-like and more attractive to users. This e-college time table retrieval system currently focuses on the relationships between staffs, coordinators and higher officials. The work of this paper is continued by having discussion with teaching professionals to ensure that the college time table retrieval system meets their needs and improvement on this system is being done based on their feedback. References 1. Chia- Feng Lin, An Easy-To-Use Feed Middleware for Application Development with RSS/Atom Feeds,International Conference on Convergence Information Technology, 2007. 2. Douglas O shaughnessy, Interacting With Computers by Voice: Automatic Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Proceedings of the IEEE, VOL 91, No.9,September, 2003. 3. Firat Kart, Gengxin Miao, L. E. Moser, P. M. Melliar-Smith, A Distributed e-healthcare System Based on the Service Oriented Architecture, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. 4. HongqiaoYang1, KechengLiu, Renchu Gan, An Adaptive Architecture for Healthcare Systems, Proceedings of the 2009 International Symposium on Web Information Systems and Applications (WISA 09). 5. Klaus Bayrhammer, Thomas Grechenig, Harald K ostinger, Michael Fiedler, Wolfgang Schramm Using a rule based service bus for controlling data flows in patient centric hospital information systems., Vienna university technology, Institute of computer aided automation,vienna,1040,austria, http://amaieee.embs.org/2011conf/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/using_a_rule_based.pdf 6. Kryvinska, N., Next Generation Applications Mobility Management with SOA - A Scenario-Based Analysis, International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS), 2010. A.Parkavi 264