A web portal based framework for the integration of business processes to support the networked virtual university

This poster describes the work done to provide the web based integration of business processes and educational Quality Assurance (QA) systems across the Networked Virtual University (NVU). This poster presents the semantic integration framework and highlights the interdisciplinary challenges met in the effort to enable the presence of a NVU on the web. The poster also presents the architectural design for a Web Portal Framework based on the Web Services for Remote Portlet (WSRP) standard and shows the architecture and components of a transparent Business Process Management System supporting the NVU [Ma et al 2007]. The architecture supports intelligent agents responsible for the transformation and mapping of semantic elements across NVU partner systems. The poster presents and evaluates a case study of a NVU portal system using WS-BPEL standards to provide semantic and business process integration through web service choreography and orchestration. The portlet-based architecture of the system is presented and the role of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and portlet technologies in the integration of business processes across partner institutions is shown. An evaluation of the architecture and use of the web technologies for the NVU is presented; in particular the weakness of BPEL in supporting human-centric business processes is highlighted. Additionally, the poster presents an analysis of the challenges of interdisciplinary work necessary for the effective and flexible design and development of the NVU portal system in the case study presented. The poster concludes with a brief summary and pointers to further work.