Abstract

The paper reports on early stages of a Design Science research project where a Knowledge Graph strategy is adopted in order to increase the value of data being managed by a higher education institution. Legacy IT systems have been developed in the investigated institution over more than 20 years, leading to data silos that require heavy synchronization jobs. These had to be automated with significant effort and are scheduled on a daily basis in order to resolve synchronizations and conflicts between conceptually overlapping SQL databases that are hosted on different servers from different vendors, each serving a different application. An initial proof-of-concept based on a Knowledge Graph strategy is being iteratively developed as part of an institutional project in order to satisfy novel analysis scenarios that are not well supported by the As-Is, app-centric, data silo architecture. Design decisions to enable the new analysis scenarios are hereby presented within the frame of Design Science research.

Recommended Citation

Buchmann, R. A., Dragoș, R., & Ghiran, A. M. (2021). From the Application-Centric to the Knowledge-Centric University: A Design Science Proof-of-Concept. In E. Insfran, F. González, S. Abrahão, M. Fernández, C. Barry, H. Linger, M. Lang, & C. Schneider (Eds.), Information Systems Development: Crossing Boundaries between Development and Operations (DevOps) in Information Systems (ISD2021 Proceedings). Valencia, Spain: Universitat Politècnica de València.

Paper Type

Full Paper

Share

COinS
 

From the Application-Centric to the Knowledge-Centric University: A Design Science Proof-of-Concept

The paper reports on early stages of a Design Science research project where a Knowledge Graph strategy is adopted in order to increase the value of data being managed by a higher education institution. Legacy IT systems have been developed in the investigated institution over more than 20 years, leading to data silos that require heavy synchronization jobs. These had to be automated with significant effort and are scheduled on a daily basis in order to resolve synchronizations and conflicts between conceptually overlapping SQL databases that are hosted on different servers from different vendors, each serving a different application. An initial proof-of-concept based on a Knowledge Graph strategy is being iteratively developed as part of an institutional project in order to satisfy novel analysis scenarios that are not well supported by the As-Is, app-centric, data silo architecture. Design decisions to enable the new analysis scenarios are hereby presented within the frame of Design Science research.