International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 23– No.4, June 2011 6 A Framework for Personalized Information Integration in Higher Education Institutes Bahram Amini Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia Roliana Ibrahim Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia Mohd Shahizan Othman Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia ABSTRACT Information integration plays an important role in academic settings since it provides a comprehensive view of educations and enables managers to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of education processes. However, the diversity and huge amount of information available in different academic sources overwhelms the education administrators and debilitates decision makings. This paper proposes a service-oriented framework which augments recommendation approach with components of semantic-based information integration and provides interactive and contextual- based information integration for decision makers in Higher Education Institutes. The underlying semantic web technology facilitates on-demand integration of information from internal sources as well as the Web and provides web service discovery and invocation for effective information analysis. In addition, the framework enables the users to analyze instances of student’s information and to receive recommendation of new information sources as well as appropriate analytical services based on the students’ status. Service orientation paradigm provides dynamic and flexible means of communication for service interoperability among the framework components. General Terms Framework, Personalization, Decision Making Keywords Personalization, Semantic Web, Information Integration, Service- Oriented Architecture, Higher Education Institute 1. INTRODUCTION Data integration has emerged as a natural requirement of organizations from the early life of software systems. With the advent of new information technologies such as Internet and intranet, the need for information integration from a number of independent and heterogeneous sources is rapidly growing. Although organizations such as Higher Education Institutes (HEI) began to deploy large and complex information systems to support their educational activities, the need for comprehensive information which provides the global view of education process based on different occasion is still required. There is no need to say that HEI often needs to combine various types of educational data such as student records, schedules, scholarship, and alumni information altogether, preferably in a flexible, scalable and personalized manner, in order to make a global insight into current state of individual education processes including students. Therefore, information integration plays an important role in the educational environment since it provides a comprehensive view of education data and enables the managers to analyze and evaluate the performance of education processes and make effective decisions. However, in spite of many research on information integration in the recent years, the need for flexible, scalable, and personalized information integration encourages scholars [1]. This paper proposes a framework which combines suitable components of semantic based technologies. It provides interactive and flexible information integration for decision making in higher education institutes such as universities and colleges. This framework aims to integrate information sources from internal education database and combines them with relevant information from the Web. In addition, the system enables users to analy ze and evaluate instances of information with various analytical tools in a personalized fashion and to incorporate new sources of information on demand. In the following sections, the aspect of higher education institutes is described in Section 2 and challenges and motivations in Section 3, respectively. Personalization and technology supports in terms of information integration are described in Section 4, and the proposed framework to personalized information integration in Section 5. A working example is presented in Section 6 and finally, the summarization of the framework and contribution is discussed in Section 7. 2. ASPECTS of HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUES In general, HEI from the information system perspective are academic organizations combining legacy and modern systems of different technologies. Basically, there is a need to have a unified access to information systems in order to monitor and analysis important aspects of the education processes. This situation