Smart University: An architecture proposal for

information management using Open Data for research

projects.

Marlon Santiago Viñán-Ludeña1,3[0000-0003-2692-5899], Luis Roberto Jacome-Galarza2[0000-

0002-2886-3372]
, Luis Rodríguez Montoya 1[0000-0003-3134-7157] , Andy Vega Leon1[0000-0003-
0106-6880]
and Christian Campoverde Ramírez 1[0000-0002-1686-8299]
1
Universidad Nacional de Loja, Loja 110103, Ecuador
2
Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Guayaquil, Ecuador
3
Universidad de Granada, Granada 18071, Spain
[email protected]

Abstract. The ubiquity of information is traditionally framed with Smart Cities

in which, information is based on the integration of information, efficiency, sus-
tainability and participatory governance. Ubiquity is present in all areas and
domains, that is; why the “Smart University architecture” is proposed. The main
goal of this work is to present the proposal for the information integration relat-
ed to research projects of the “Universidad Nacional de Loja” (Ecuador). This
proposal refers to the implementation of a three-layer architecture: (i) raw data
collected manually or automatically from research projects; (ii) data structu-
ration and data enrichment using external sources following the Open Data phi-
losophy and (iii) exploitation and visualization of the information. The use of
web services allows this architecture to automatically manage and share all the
necessary information that serves as a basis to have the main characteristics of a
smart university: adaptation, sensing, inferring, self-learning, anticipation and
self-organization; and in addition, generate new business and research ideas.

Keywords: Smart University, integration of information, Open Data, architec-

ture, Web services.

1 Introduction

The IoT (Internet of Things) revolution has allowed that any device can be con-
nected through the web; i.e. cameras, sensors, motion detectors, wearables, etc. This
generates large volumes of information that must be captured, structured and stored.
Research projects in the academy, generates large volumes of data that after being
processed, generate useful information for the benefit of the university and the society
in general.
Each university requires a general-purpose system architecture that can incorporate
repositories with heterogeneous data, as it is the case of this research projects. The
system must be of general purpose in which the information or research results can be
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accessed, allowing the exploitation of information by entrepreneurships and new pro-

fessionals. It is important to highlight that the information will not only be available
to the university’s community (people) but, when it is processed it will follow the
Open Data philosophy and it can be accessed automatically (machines).

1.1 Related works

In [1], they present Octopus, an Open Source, dynamically extensible system that
supports information management for internet of things applications in which its ar-
chitecture is based on web services.
Another interesting work [2], uses an ubiquitous computing platform based on
NFC, where these devices and applications interact with each other to provide an
intelligent environment.
In [3], they use an architecture with three layers; sensing, data storage and analyt-
ics. They focus on the classroom attendance, student study space usage, parking lot
occupancy and bus-stop waiting-times.
A framework is proposed in [4], that involves (a) smart people -support staffs, aca-
demic staffs and students-; (b) big data analytics; (c) smart classroom -smart band,
smart board and blended learning- and smart faculty -e-learning, automated building
management and smart attendance-. They mention that there are a lot of benefits in
becoming a smart university, such as increasing the education quality, the research
output by implementing the right analysis and understanding lots of information
through the use of big data, improved ranking and performance.
In this study [5], a daily analysis of internet traffic is carried out, in addition, four
learning approaches were used to analyze and compare the collected information,
however, they don’t mention any architecture for the treatment of that data.
In [6], they consider the self-learning property as a basic constitutive feature of a
smart university and validate mathematically this criteria, in addition, they consider
the smart university as a self-learning organization functioning on the basis of a team
of like-minded people that has an established mechanism, such as: learning ability,
relation convergence, the transfer and increase of knowledge, meeting the society
requirements, adapting promptly to contemporary economic conditions.
In [7], they developed and tested models of defining a smart university infrastruc-
ture development level, taking into account some indices of assessment like: the use
of smart platforms, smart technologies, smart knowledge management systems, the
teaching staff using smart technologies, the use of mobile devices during the learning
process and the use of the e-learning tools.
Another study[8], shows the technologies that are implemented in smart campuses
and smart universities which are: big data, cloud computing, internet of things and
artificial intelligence. They indicate by “Smart campus” four thematic axes: infra-
structure, governance and management, services and education; and for “smart uni-
versity” highlights the development of an architecture that contributes to the active
application of smart technologies and devices in the educational process.
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In [9], they propose a system architecture for smart universities that provides smart
building monitoring and management. The proposed a solution that integrates hetero-
geneous geographically disparate sensor networks and devices and enables optimal
operations of the building while reducing its energy footprint.
In [10], they propose the concept of Smart University describing needs and ad-
vantages and ending with a possible architecture based on smart objects.
In [11], they present a framework architecture for integrating various types of wire-
less networks into a smart university campus to enhance communication among stu-
dents, instructors, and administration.
In [12], ], they focuses on how to leverage IoT technologies to build a modular ap-
proach to smart campuses. The work identifies the key benefits and motivation behind
the development of IoT-enabled campus. Then, it provides a view of general types of
smart campus applications.
In the present work, we proposed an architecture that permits establishing an infra-
structure that allows collecting data and visualize the processed information. This
architecture establishes the basis for a university to become smart. We believe that the
first step is the collection, processing and visualization of information that comes
from the results of research projects, so that, in the future, inferences can be made,
optimization process can be carried out, new research-ideas can be proposed and pro-
vide new tools for the generation of new business ideas.
This work is divided into four sections. Section 1 presents an introduction and lit-
erature review about “Smart University”. Section 2 presents a theoretical background.
Section 3 presents the architecture proposal and the final section summarizes the con-
clusions, recommendations and future work.

2 Theoretical background

The concept of smart university requires universities to provide students with suitable
software/hardware systems and assistive technologies that will help them to succeed
in technological learning environments such as smart classrooms and laboratories,
smart libraries, and smart campuses. [13].
The Smart University involves a comprehensive modernization of all educational
process [14]. The architecture involves several layers, where the number of layers
decides the architecture complexity; five-layer architecture is the ideal from the per-
spective of security and complexity and should integrate the main technologies that
actually exist: (a) big data, (b) cloud computing, (c) internet of things and (d) data
analysis.
In [15], they present the outcomes of an ongoing research project at the InterLabs
Research Institute, Bradley University (Peoria, IL, U.S.A.) aimed to validate “smart-
ness-features” for a smart university; in this study, they include some components:
• Smart software and hardware systems: Smart learning analytics systems, web-
lecturing systems, collaborative web-based audio/video one-to-one and many-to-
many communication systems, interactive whiteboards, panoramic video cameras,
robotic controllers and actuators, etc.
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• Smart technologies: Internet-of-things technologies, cloud computing technology,

web-lecturing technology, smart agents technology, augmented and virtual reality
technology, sensors, and so on.
• Smart pedagogy: Collaborative learning, crowdsourcing-based learning, serious
games and gamification-based learning, smart robots-based learning, etc.
• Stakeholders: Students (local, online), lifelong learners, students with disabilities,
professional staff, etc.
Finding that, the main features of a smart university are:
1. Adaptation that consists in the ability to automatically modify its teaching/learning
strategies, administrative workflows, safety, technological and other characteris-
tics.
2. Sensing, that deals with the ability to automatically use various sensors/control de-
vices to understand the university’s operation, infrastructure or well-being of its
components.
3. Inferring, that means the ability to automatically make logical conclusions from the
basis of raw data.
4. Self-learning, that consists in the ability to automatically obtain, acquire or formu-
late new knowledge or modifying it.
5. Anticipation, that deals with the intelligence and predictive analytics in software
systems that have the ability to automatically collect raw data.
6. Self-organization, with the ability to automatically change its internal structure
without the intervention of an external agent.

3 Architecture proposal

The main objective of this work is to create and implement a “Smart University” ar-
chitecture that allows storing data from research projects -data before processing and
information generated after that data has been processed to generate visualizations,
reports and so on-. The Fig.1 shows the proposed architecture.
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Fig.1.Smart University architecture

3.1 Capturing layer

In this layer are identified sensors, social networks, data generated from the web that
could be extracted and stored, and data that have been manually captured -surveys,
interviews, physical records, etc.-.
The raw data measured from sensors will first pass through an interface that allows
that information to be transformed into readable data and then stored in the general
database. We decided to use JSON -JavaScript Object Notation- because it is a light-
weight format for data exchange. Each observation or measurement must be trans-
formed to this format that must have: “sensor identifier”, “research project identifier”
and “content”. Then, this data is transferred through the web service so that it is stored
on “Raw data” server.
In this work, it is essential that each research project that incorporates sensors,
must take into account and eliminate those commercial sensors that send data to the
provider’s cloud, since it is indispensable that the data is kept in the databases and
don’t leave the campus or our proposed infrastructure, in addition, this allows us to
have independence and don’t depend on a provider to access our data.
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3.2 Processing layer

It stores all data that have been captured in the previous layer, specifically on a raw
data server. After being stored they go through a cleaning process and then through an
enrichment process -if necessary-. Then, the data is stored in another centralized and
global server where all the processed information will be kept. The information in this
server will be aligned with the Open Data philosophy.
Linked data describes a method of publishing structured data that can be intercon-
nected and more useful. Despite the efforts made in this line of research, it is still not
possible for the web to be interconnected, in such way that necessary metadata can be
used to obtain significant conclusions from this data. There are efforts made by
CKAN, Dbpedia, GeoNames, etc.; which create semantic data that can be linked and
interconnected but there is still no massification of this process[16]. One of the first
steps is to propose architectures that follow this philosophy.

3.3 Analytics layer

This layer allows getting processed data from the central repository to generate analy-
sis, reports and visualizations. This new source of information will allow the universi-
ty community (especially students and graduates) to generate business ideas.
This architecture is composed by a Restful Web Service that interconnects all lay-
ers and will allow the entire university community, to obtain manually the infor-
mation of the research projects, but it can also work so that machines can automatical-
ly access the data -machine to machine communication-.
With the proposed architecture, it is established the basis for the management of in-
formation from research projects, since all of them are based on data capture either
manually or automatically -sensing-; while adaptation, inferring, self-learning antici-
pation and self-organization are tasks that will be developed later.
This work tries to establish an architecture for information management for re-
search projects. This is aligned with the open science initiative that has the aim of
improving science, with some benefits such as: improving the interpretation, under-
standing and reproducibility of research results; greater transparency in the life cycle
of science avoiding fraud; reduction of the cost of research projects; promotion of the
reuse of results and better identification and evaluation results. [17]. This will allow to
obtain the raw data, the processing and the results of the researches through platforms
such as Rpubs o github; with that, students will be able to propose new uses of data
through degree works, innovate through startups or continue researching based on
these results.

4 Conclusions

In this work, we propose an architecture that allows to manage all the collected in-
formation from research projects, and to efficiently access the results of that research.
This open data repository will have a web service to access the information, so that
anyone can access and use it to generate new business ideas for the benefit of the
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society. This will allow transparent processes, the reuse of information and universal
participation.
In the other hand, it is remarkable that Smart Universities will be persuaded to au-
tomate common processes for being more efficient and optimize the consumption of
resources in order to be environmentally friendly. Moreover, in the coming years,
universities will have to adapt their infrastructure to the needs of remote students.
One of the biggest challenges is the privacy of the data, especially when we are us-
ing cameras to make facial or vehicle license recognition; that information cannot be
shared between different entities. In addition, each sensor provider has a format in
which the collected data is presented for processing. Another major challenge is to
standardize heterogeneous information in JSON format and then it can be processed
in a homogeneous way.
As a future work, we plan to share the experience of having an open data platform
for research projects and to contribute with the ideas that have been generated from
processed information. Initially, the proposed architecture will follow the Open Data
philosophy without linking and interconnecting data; subsequently, it is intended to
identify all the ontologies for each of the research projects to get interconnecting the
data that has been stored.

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