An XML-based framework for management of a course catalog system with zero information-loss.
详细信息
文摘
The transition from paper-oriented record keeping to their on-line counterpart has been anything but smooth. Often,the on-line systems are difficult to use and do not provide a structure to maintain organizational memory and procedures. A user momentarily sees the part he/she is currently working on and not aware of the big picture. Often,the user is has to work in such convoluted ways that require considerable learning curve. The Course Catalog at universities seem to be facing this these problems. In this thesis we provide XCCat,an XML-based road-map for an enterprise solution for design,implementation,usage,and maintenance of course catalogs for institutions of higher learning. XCCat brings information about curriculum requirements,courses,changes to courses,approval sequences,participants and deliberations surrounding catalog development,and report generation under a single umbrella in a live XML-based database that not only remembers everything but can also be queried for this memory. The concept of catalog publication is carefully developed so when a catalog for the next year is published,the development version of the catalog for the following year is also published； the latter automatically carries forward the unfinished work in progress. This simplifies many things: need for tracking is reduced considerably,the development version of the catalog is always available,increases opportunities for collaboration,there is only one goto place foll all participants e.g. university,colleges,and programs) for all catalog related issues. There is only one view of the catalog,all information is visible to everyone except the parts that need authorization for making updates. A fair portion that is enough to assess the viability of the ideas behind XCCat have already been implemented. The approach comes close to what has been termed zero information-loss in the field of temporal databases. In the zero information loss model,one could query data,the database history of data,query updates,and query queries. Zero information-loss is a part of what is known as provenance in databases and information systems these days.