[CAnet - news] Cyber-Infrastructure for university academic applications

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[This announcement is very similar to the work being led by UBC and MIT on
developing open source SOA applications for universities
http://educationcommons.org/projects/display/SOA/Home. Some excerpts from
www.gridtoday.com article -- BSA]  

IBM Awards Rice $700K for Shared University Research Project

Rice University and IBM have announced they will collaborate on the
development of an open-standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA)
that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly
diverse academic software applications.

"In academia today, discrete, open-source, academic applications such as
courseware management systems, digital libraries and content commons are
becoming central to the life of a university," said Kamran Khan, vice
provost for information technology. "It is important to tie these
stand-alone applications together into a more coherent whole."

IBM's gift will enable Rice to collaborate in the research and development
of an open-standards-based SOA for higher education called the Rice Open
Collaborative Learning Environment (Open-CLE). Rice will provide a working
demonstration environment to validate the approach.

A service-oriented architecture, or SOA, enables computers to share data and
tasks among disparate applications, helping an organization to more closely
align technology with business goals. In academia, an SOA also enables each
member of a group of institutions to create its own suite of tools to
support particular research, collaboration and learning needs. Providing
such integration and customization is critical if open-standards-based
environments are to become a viable alternative for meeting the needs of
higher education institutions around the world.

Rice University and IBM will collaborate to design an SOA for Rice's
Open-CLE. This SOA will allow individual educational and research
applications to "talk" with each other. Rice's largest open standards
applications today include Sakai -- a leading open source course management
system; OwlSpace, powered by Sakai and operating as the framework for Rice's
web-based Collaboration and Learning Environment; Connexions, a
collaborative, educational web-based environment composed of independent
teaching modules that can be used alone or connected into larger courses;
and DSpace, a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes,
preserves and distributes digital research material.

This SOA will provide a working integration layer that ties together
disparate applications of interest and importance to higher education, using
IBM's WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The integration will provide
an open standard for linking higher-education applications together and will
provide a strong foundation for both continued application development and
user acceptance.

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