Title: An XML Based University Course Catalog Management System (Web Application)
Date/Time: January 9th, 2017 @ 2:00 PM
Place: 223 Atanasoff
Major Professor: Shashi Gadia
Committee Members: Leslie Miller, Wensheng Zhang
Abstract:
Course Catalog is a critical document in every institution of higher learning which is published every year with information on all courses, after going through a process of updates and multi-level approvals from many participants across various entities like
department, college and university on each course. The process is rather complex and difficult to coordinate as a single comprehensive document is updated based on inputs from many separate entities while the communication is handled through legacy electronic means like e-mails and spreadsheets that do not provide a structure to maintain organizational memory and procedures. Professor Gadia had an idea to build an application that would provide the single page view of the unified central course catalog document through XML based framework. Based on the idea, a java based application named XCCat has been developed but later discontinued as there were performance and user interface issues. Continuing the idea, while resolving the issues faced with XCCat application, we have developed a generic web based university catalog application taking ISU course catalog as use case. My oral defense mainly focuses on the motivation to use XML as database, architectural and implementation details of the various components in Web API and User Interface (UI) of web based university catalog management application and its future scope.