International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 2, Issue 12, December 2012) 172 Education Enterprise Services Repository using Service Oriented Architecture Poonam Ponde 1 , Dr. S. C. Shirwaikar 2 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Pune, Pune 411007 2 Department of Computer Science, Nowrosjee Wadia College, Pune 411001 Abstract— In the education sector, business and learning applications need to be modernized to meet an extended community of learners and other stakeholders. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) prescribes a new way of building applications within a more powerful, flexible programming model, reducing development and ownership costs as also implementation risks. In this paper, we have proposed a technology, data and application architecture using SOA. Apart from the services required by the technology, data architecture and application architecture, a set of other services is also needed. This paper also discusses the need and contents of a service repository for an Education Enterprise. Some high granularity services required in any academic setup are also described. Keywords— Architecture, Education, Services, SOA, Repository. I. INTRODUCTION Academic Institutions are large organizations with very high information processing needs. An educational institution is a service provider and like any other service providing organization, has a diversity of stakeholders, each having its own set of expectations and requirements [1]. The widespread use of technology in the teaching and learning process has radically changed the face of education globally. Educational Institutions are becoming larger and more diverse, offering more interdisciplinary programs, programs on multiple campuses, and joint programs with other institutions. There is a growing demand among learners for distance, self-paced and flexible learning. The students expect to have anytime, anywhere and seamless access to the resources of the institution they deal with. Advanced networking and communication technologies and tools are emerging everyday. To meet the requirements and challenges, an educational institute needs a variety of information system initiatives. So far, educational institutions typically operated in a highly decentralized manner with business units allowed considerable autonomy to choose their computing systems, business rules and operating practices [2]. As a common scenario, in most institutions the applications are developed by different vendors at different points in time , as and when processing needs are identified; leading to an application architecture that is difficult to maintain and extend. Educational institutions should be viewed as a business enterprise so that the software solutions can be designed on the basis of business processes. Any end to end flow of information is automated into an application. Each of the stakeholders gets required services by interacting with one or more such applications. There is need for a set of guidelines or a framework for educational institutions to specify how different entities in an enterprise should be constructed and should communicate to leverage better interoperability, performance and security [3]. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged with potential to solve integration and reusability problems faced by large organizations [4]. Service-oriented architecture presents an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as services to either end-user applications or other services[5]. In this paper, we have described an architecture based on SOA and identified a set of services required to handle architectural as well as functional requirements of an education enterprise. We have also briefly discussed the implementation of College Notice board as a service. II. SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE A. Services Service is a well-defined, self-contained, discoverable, callable, reusable unit of business functionality, defined using explicit interfaces, invokable through common communication protocols. Services provide interoperability and location transparency [6]. Although services and components have no clear distinction, the advantage of using Services over components is the level of abstraction and the platform independence[7]. Services may be made up of many components internally as shown in Figure 1, which is hidden from the service consumer while a set of interfaces are published. These interfaces can be accessed using well defined protocols over the internet or intranet.