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Applications Architecture

For a change, I had a week with very few meetings, which allowed me to progress some of the items on my long list of outstanding actions.  One of the things I spent some time on was the reorganisation of our Applications Architecture wiki pages, which have been ably improved over recent weeks by   Richard Good.

This work has had rather a long gestation and remains a work in progress but we have reached the stage where we have circulated the link and asked our colleagues for feedback on the formats.   At the current time we are particularly looking to confirm the format for the Data and Service Registry, and for the list of External Standards.

We have simplified the top level page, which now links to the following sub-pages:
  • Introduction: What is an “Applications Architecture”, and information about the Governance Group.
  • Principles and Patterns: The core principles of the group and “patterns” of how interfaces should be designed.
  • Data and Service Registry:  In some sense the core of the architecture, this will be a list of definitions of the common data or entity types which are key to the core business of the University, together with the interfaces that should be used to access them.  This includes some initial examples, such as Identity, Activity (from Timetabling), Fault and Group.
  • Specific Areas of the Architecture: High-level overviews of how components work together in specific areas, such as the student record (EUGEX), Provisioning, the interface between SITS and Finance, or Calendar systems.
  • External Standards: This will be a list of the external standards for data schemas used in our definitions, such as eduPerson, iCalendar & LTI.
  • Annual planning: Results of the group’s review of annual planning projects from last year; this year’s review will be added in due course.
 My aim is to get agreement on the basic layout so that we have a resource that we can grow over the months and years.

For readers within the University, you can see the pages at the following link.

Appplications Architecture Wiki pages

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