Microsoft word - 16 orbitron _pp 94-_.doc

Journal of Applied Science and the Environment, Vol. 3, pp 95-102, 2012 ISSN: 2141-1360 2012 School of Technology, Federal Polytechnic, Idah, Kogi State, Nigeria. Orbitron: A SERVICE-CENTRIC ACADEMIC RECORDS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
FOR NIGERIAN POLYTECHNICS
I I AYOGU1* AND 2FA SANI
1Department of Science Laboratory Technology, Federal Polytechnic, Idah Kogi State Nigeria. 2Department of Computer Science, Federal Polytechnic, Idah Kogi State Nigeria. * Correspondence: [email protected] ABSTRACT
The chain of process events involved in the admission, registration, computation of examination results, storage and retrieval of examination records and other post-graduation services offered to students in an academic institution is cycled in a perpetual manner. Tracing and retracing these event cycles with their corresponding demands on the operating staff and budget are quite worrisome because of attendant poor service delivery. Errors are often propagated along the process chain – some of which go undetected, thereby compromising integrity, quality and fidelity. A three-tier client server system for processing, storage and retrieval of students’ academic records is described in this work. This report is biased towards result processing, storage and retrieval component of the system because the processes of servicing transcript requests together with other associated documents is almost always burdensome for officers charged with such responsibilities. Key words: Client/Server, Result Processing, Entity sets, Relationship sets, Redundancy.

INTRODUCTION
of ICT application on the system. This is the cause of the often perceived complications that The cycle of events involved in the admission, registration, computation of examination results, storage and retrieval of examination records and other post-graduation services To ease these problems, improve efficiency offered to students in an academic institution and increase service delivery at a bearable is perpetual. The amount of human efforts and cost, we have designed and implemented a material resources committed to this cycle of three-tier client server application which is activities are great with grave budgetary implications. The perpetual threading of these event cycles with their corresponding demands on the operating staff is more worrisome THE MOTIVATING SCENARIO
because of attendant poor service delivery.
The creation and management of students’
Errors are often propagated along the process chain; some of which go undetected, as a institution, involves application for admission, result of redundant and repetitive activities, admission selection, registration (involving which has become de-facto in the process chain, thereby compromising integrity, quality examination results, storage of examination transcripts, and certificates to graduands. education management has numerous positive most tertiary institutions in Nigeria have presents the most difficult problems to the invested greatly in the provision of ICT desk officers responsible for preparing these facilities to enable easy and efficient storage and retrieval of students’ records, poor expected, ask for these documents only after a implementation and/or an uninformed choice of solution have debarred the expected effect graduation and mostly when they do, it is J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 required very urgently. At such times there records office. This procedure is redundant, may have been physical transfers from one moreso; it puts the registrant through the accommodation to another, files moved, mixed hassles of a wasted efforts since his data on the up and even misplaced, leaving the operating portal are almost always never reused. What if registration is done on an institution-wide reconciling and verification of records which intranet where students may log in, register for semesters and necessarily create reports? It students’ need as it sometimes require an upwards of two weeks to sort out. This hassle management office can access the registration data for onward transmission to other institutional subunits that might have the need The process of application for admission is done online in most Nigerian institutions of higher learning today, making the process Examination result processing is a complex fairly easier, faster and cheaper for both the procedure that requires carefully designed and applicant and institutions as institutions no reliable systems to implement. The traditional longer have to print hard copy forms and the monolithic (host-based) processing system that applicants can make applications from the is rampant in our institutions today is quite comfort of their homes. This is true but there inept in a number of significant ways. Most is a need to ask, what these institutions do with worrisome are the fact that resources are the data posted online during application. Are expended in as much as there are the number these ever used for any other purpose? Most, if of academic departments, training is required not all institutions embark on a fresh process for as many as there are the operators at the of data acquisition from the admitted students. managing data, and data pooling for decision comprehensive ICT automation systems are support analysis is a significant problem. enabled, it is possible to transfer data from the online store to the local store where it is easily services rendered to graduands cumbersome manipulated for use in subsequent processes to and inefficient. Although a properly designed save the stress of acquiring fresh data from low-cost, easy-to-implement system such as the one being described here, easily overcome these problems and speedup high quality During admission, selection is often based on some set of predetermined adjustable criteria Institutions to modify their development but this is hardly automated in any institution agenda and provide for the re-engineering of and thus constitutes a herculean task for the set the current service processes to utilize of staff charged with such responsibility. emerging IT capabilities through committed Automation will not only ensure equitable selection but enhance the process and ensure that only suitably qualified candidates are development. The impact of service-centric applications on educational institution has been studied by Zhao et al., (2008). The complexity of the registration process depends on the extant policies of the target THE CLIENT/SERVER ARCHITECTURE IN
institution but would usually always follow- INFORMATION SYSTEMS
through certain baseline activities including document verification, obtaining clearance to The open systems architecture products from make payment, opening academic record files different vendors are easily interchangeable and registration of initial or first semester courses. In our institutions today, some of the registration exercises are done through a web Interoperability means that open systems can portal with functionalities enabling the exchange information meaningfully with each registrant to print a report of his registration other without regard to vendors, forming the for onward submission to the filling office in basis of client-server applications. The both the department and at the examination rationale for three-tier architecture in the view of the US State of North Carolina, (2004) is J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 platforms where the executables are deployed anticipated to have high usage volumes and/or (State of Utah, 1998). In two-tier client-server long life spans are better served by three-tier architectures, application functionalities are service oriented architectures since they are partitioned into two executable parts. One part easier to modify to support rule changes and containing both the code implementing the easily made to support multiple user interfaces (State of North Carolina, 2004; Soesianlo and workstations (the clients) and requests data Ibrahim, 1999; Orfali et al., 1999). from the second tier, executing on the machine where the application’s data is stored The client-server subject embodies large (the server side). Client-server applications partitioned into three executable tiers of range of functions, services, and other aspects functionalities are three-tier. It does not imply of the distributed environment (Soesianlo and that the three tiers execute on three different Ibrahim, 1999). A comprehensive analysis and investigation of all the issues and concepts Ruffer et al., 1995; State of Utah, 1998). management of client/server systems have Two-tier client-server applications are more been considered in Orfali et al., (1999). The difficult and more expensive to modify when client/server software architecture is a robust, business requirements change. But although message-based and modular infrastructure that three-tier systems, are advantageously more is designed to improve usability, flexibility, flexible on the choice of where the application interoperability, and scalability as compared to centralized, mainframe, and time sharing systematic modification, they still suffer from computing (Zhao et al., 2008; Soesianlo and Ibrahim, 1999; Orfali, et al., 1999). monolithic applications except with modular implementation of the business process logic A client/server system, basically consisting of (Soesianlo and Ibrahim, 1999; Ruffer et al., a client, a server and a network infrastructure, is often seen as a system that integrate hardware, software, and networking protocols A client is a software application that allows a to enable seamless resource sharing to support user or system processes to interact with a a range of ordinary and specialized business server. The Server software is equipped with functionalities that enable it respond to client multiple locations simultaneously (Orfali, et requests in a desired manner. Servers differ in al., 1999; Siong, 1996). The architectures exist their capacity to offer secure services and in as two-physical tiered and multi-tiered (N- their management of resource sharing among tiered) to enable functionality for automating the clients. The network facility is critical to general business rules, enforcing data access modalities and providing interfaces that allow implementation. It creates the physical links users and applications to intercommunicate between clients, servers, and printers as well interactively (Ruffer et al., 1995; State of Utah, 1998). Client-server applications relieve facilitating intercommunication between all the logical partitions of the application. business rules can be concentrated in one place, restricting program updates to middle middleware or database middleware, provides layer, with increased performance, resulting an extra application server layer to manage from batch processing of clients request to the The logical partitions (the tiers) of client- server applications refer to the number of heterogeneous database products within a application is partitioned, not to the number of J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 prioritization, load-balancing, data dependant Some notable benefits of the client/server routing and queuing (Orfali, et al., 1999). model include: dividing application processing across multiple machines; optimizing client architecture responds to organizational needs optimizing servers for data processing and of easy and flexible access to information, storage; horizontal and vertical scaling enabling smooth administration and reliable, capabilities, enhancing performance; and secure and proficient application development; hardware, software and networks, which often run mission-critical applications that cannot be DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
demands on information systems and networks The software is designed following a client server (Open System Architecture) paradigm. The modules are independent entities that Some distinguishing characteristics of a client- interact with the database through a middle- tier application server system. The design considered scalability, ease of installation and transparency of location, mix and match, friendliness most paramount. The three-tier model was adopted to cater for certain notable (Soesianlo and Ibrahim, 1999; Ruffer et al., shortcomings with our existing systems which force institutions to often completely abandon existing applications at the expense of budgets The strength of client-server computing is the just because the old systems are difficult to inter-process communication between client modify, upgrade, maintain and scale–up to processes and server processes. The cycles of satisfy the current needs. We have relied on client requests and server responses are managed by the inter-process communication function often provided and managed by the operating Fig. 3.1 shows how the various components of communicate with server process, performing the system interconnect and intercommunicate separate functions. Data is passed between but we choose to elaborate only the design processes using inter-process communication specifics of the result processing module functions implemented using message-passing because of the central importance it behoves on the entire integrated system and its complexity. Network Hardware and communication services Exam Processing
Academic
Students Affairs
Exam Records
Admissions
Fig. 1: The Interaction model of the academic records management system. J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 CONCEPTUAL DATABASE DESIGN
Entity ResultSummary: which holds the
cumulative result summary for students at The database design is based on the relational database model which is still the most widely adopted database model used in most of The conceptual schema for the core relational today’s enterprise systems and suitable for the entity sets are as presented in Fig. 2. It focuses description of our universe of discourse. Of on the part of the database concerned with the three levels of data abstraction in database design we have chosen to give the details of storage and retrieval whose schema diagram is the conceptual design of the result processing presented in Fig. 3 with primary keys in bold face. Foreign key dependencies appear as arrows from the foreign key attributes of the The views were designed to allow users access referencing relation to the primary key of the manner. The requirements of each user group have been used to set up the views to ensure Student_Schema {MatricNo, StudentName, DeptId}
confidentiality. Thus a user belonging to user Department_Schema { DeptId, DeptName, SchlId}
School_Schema {SchlId, SchlName, SchlId}
information designated for user group B. As in Course_Schema {CourseId, CourseTitle, SemesterId}
relational database management systems, the Semester_Schema {SemesterId, SemesterName}
conceptual schema is used to describe all Employee_Schema {EmpNo, EmpName, DeptId}
relations that are stored in the database. The CourseReg_Schema {MatricNo, CourseId, SemesterId}
following entity sets are core to the result SemesterResult_Schema {MatricNo, Score1, Score2,., Score n}
Rerun_Schema {MatricNo, CourseId, SemesterId}
process segment of the database and we use ResultSummary_Schema {MatricNo, CTP, CCU, CGPA}
Entity School: to which at least one department
Entity Student: whose result would be processed,
The entity-relationship (E-R) model of the database segment that we are showing is as in Entity Department: this must belong to a
school/faculty, whose students must have relationships among the select entities as well attended examinations and scores provided as their relationship set cardinality limits. The relationship sets are coded as numbers 1-12 Entity Course: this must belong to a group of
and are listed and explained in Table1. The students in a given department and offered relationship set cardinality limits define the in a given semester of a particular academic participation of the concerned entities in the given relationship. The participation of department, Entity Semester: this must have been completed in
semesterresult and semester entity sets in the Entity Employee: who must be concerned with
respectively are total since every of these entities participates in at least one relationship in the corresponding relation. Participation Entity CourseRegistration: concerned with
constraints mapped by cardinality limits of the keeping the list of courses registered in a forms 0.* and 1.* are partial since only some entities in the set participate in relationship set. Entity SemesterResult: which holds records of
examination results for students for a given semester. Entity Rerun: which holds records of failed courses
J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 EmpNo
SchlId
DeptId
CourseId
MatricNo
MatricNo
Se
mId
MatricNo
Table 1: Relationship set definition for the result management component Relationship
Definition
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
not within the reach, PCs with Pentium IV Hardware
Server requirements are as it would be for customized server. The storage requirement is a function of time and use. Clients should medium level client request volumes. Most have at least 256MB of RAM, not lower than server machines available at vendor shops Pentium III (1.0GHz) processor for optimal are adequate. When conventional servers are J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 Fig. 4: The E-R model of our Result processing Component.
Software
EMBEDDED SECURITY FEATURES
reach, we have tested the application on The database is strictly directly accessible by Windows 7 operating system and found it a the administrator only. Users access to the good alternative. Client must run Windows database is strictly through stored package procedures such that transactions on the database are controlled and traceable through J. Appl. Sci. Environ., 3: 95-102, 2012 audit trails associated with the respective reporting services useful for a production user in the designated category. Updates are environment like an academic institution. allowed only if validations and integrity The system has been tested using standard checks have passed. The administrator has testing techniques and is currently in use at unrestricted access and authority to all The Federal Polytechnic, Idah Kogi State, package options such that he can define user categories, create users and grant them access levels for specific tasks or operations CONCLUSION

for a specified time and day. The system also application for administrative support in the IMPLEMENTATION AND TESTING

The system is implemented using Microsoft
details of a service-centric, three-tier client- Visual Basic 6.0 (Application Layer and user server academic records management system Interface) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, has been described with particular emphasis on result processing and management, has Apart from the low-cost installation, the been presented. This work has painstakingly choice of platform and associated tools is taken into account, all the difficult levels of based on the fact that they are widely popular record acquisition, processing, storage and and possess state-of-the-art functionality and retrieval. It succeeds in enhancing good are compatible with one another since they efficiency at reduced running costs. The system is easy to implement, maintain and propagate, allowing cooperation among all institution. It is hoped that the potentials of Server 2008 is engineered to offer higher this system will be exploited for the growth REFERENCES
Lewandowski, S. M. (1998): Frameworks for .www.jpkn.sabah.gov.my/blk/training/dream Component-Based Client/Server Computing, weaver/iiwas99b-iki.pdf accessed on June 15, ACM Computing Surveys, 30 (1) 1-25. Orfali, R., Harkey, R. D. and Edwards, J.(1999): State of North Carolina (2004): Implementation The Essential Client/Server Survival Guide. Guidelines: Application Architecture (The Reisman, S. and Dear, R.D. (1998): Managing State of Utah (1998): Three-Tier Client/Server Educational Management, 12 (5): 225 – 231. Environment. Office of the Governor State of Utah (Chief of Information Officers Section). Ruffer, S., Yen, M. D. and Lee, S. (1995): Siong, N. B. (1996): Exploiting Information Technology for Business Competitiveness. Implementation. International Journal of Information Management. 15(2):135-150. Zhao, J. L., Goul, M., Purao, S., Vitharana, P. and Soesianlo, F. and Ibrahim, I. K. (1999): The Associations of Information Systems, 1-16.

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