Project MAUI Glossary
Academic Structure - A group of MAUI modules that captures the natural relationships between the various academic entities of the University. Academic Structure is best described as a tree structure that captures the University's academic organization and classifies the University's academic programs.
AD ASTRA - Room scheduling and event management software used by the Registrar's Office to schedule all general purpose room utilization across campus.
Apache - An open source web server. http://httpd.apache.org/
API (Application Programming Interface) - A series of functions that programs use to communicate with the operating system or other applications.
Athena - The internal database used by the Center for Credit Programs.
Beta Test Partner - A version of a product which is in final testing stages and is not quite ready for the production environment.
CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) - The standard operations performed on database records.
DARwin (Degree Audit Review for Windows) - The Windows version of the Degree Audit Review software developed at Miami University. This software will be used to provide degree audits at the University of Iowa. The mainframe version currently accepts input from the current student information data stores and creates the DELI for viewing on ISIS. Upgrading to DARwin (recently rebranded to u.achieve), the windows-versioned administrative client, provides all the improvements made by the Miami staff since the last upgrade in 1995. Upgrading also provides more Transfer Course Articulation functionality than currently exists in the University's own transfer course equivalency system.
DARwin 4.0 release - See u.achieve 4.0 release
DELI (Degree Evaluation at Iowa) - The mainframe version of the Miami University DARwin software. During Project MAUI, DELI will be replaced by DARwin (recently rebranded to u.achieve).
DW (Data Warehouse) - A central repository for point of time data. Data from various enterprise applications is extracted, transformed and loaded into the data warehouse for use by analytical applications and user queries.
Enterprise Information Architecture - A suite of guidelines and system design patterns employed when implementing new Information Technology capability.
Executive Sponsors - are champions of the project to the University of Iowa community, have the authority to resolve project issues, assign resources, and to recommend or approve project expenditures, plans, and organization. They are responsible for the overall success of the project implementation and its continued operation.
Executive Steering Committee - is responsible for Institutional project guidance, vision, and communication. They provide institutional-wide perspective for the implementation project, resolve any policy issues, review project progress and budget. Be strong advocates for the project. The committee collectively decides major project objectives, schedules, and priorities. The committee is responsible for the overall project success and for ensuring that the project meets the business requirements for function, cost, quality, and schedule. The committee is responsible for setting priorities, expediting decision making, and policy recommendations with campus constituents.
FARM (Financial Aid Resource Management System) - A mainframe system developed to accommodate the processing completed in the Office of Student Financial Aid.
FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) - Federal legislation providing guidelines for the handling, storage and release of student data. The legislation provides for the protection of a student's right to privacy by specifying rules about public disclosure of student academic records and the right of a student to inspect all of their educational records and seek to amend those they deem inaccurate. For further information, see http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/finrule/2008-4/120908a.pdf
Hub - A collection of MAUI database tables relating to a specific module.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - A collection of commands (tags) that create hypertext documents that can be interpreted and rendered by web browsers.
ICON (Iowa Courses Online) - The course management system at The University of Iowa. It is based on the Desire2Learn platform.
Infobank - A web-based portal that allows faculty and staff self-service access to captured data. Access to the portal is contingent on completion of FERPA training and approval of a Dean or academic DEO.
Inspector page - A common user interface that brings together many different "tabs" of information and collects them under a single interface. An example would be the redesigned Osiris student records interface.
ISIS (Iowa Student Information Services) - The student portal for course registration and accessing student record information (e.g., grades, billing, etc).
Institution Hub - The portion of the database model relating to academic institutions, both secondary (high schools, boarding schools, academies) and post-secondary (colleges, universities, technical schools, community colleges) institutions. This expands on the data previously stored on shadow systems within the Office of Admissions.
Integration Engine - the infrastructure for linking disparate systems, applications and data sources. They transform the source data in a useable form for the target system.
Java - A programming language that is "simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, high-performance, multi-threaded, dynamic, buzzword-compliant, general-purpose programming language." http://java.sun.com/
JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) - The industry standard for database-independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of databases. http://java.sun.com/products/jdbc/
JMS (Java Message Service) - An API that provides reliable, asynchronous communication between applications in a distributed computing environment. http://java.sun.com/products/jms/
JSP (Java Server Pages) - A J2EE technology that provides a simplified, fast way to create web pages that display dynamically-generated content. http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/
J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) - Defines the standard, provides the framework and APIs for developing multitier enterprise applications using Java. http://java.sun.com/j2ee/
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) - Provides a simple protocol that allows applications to access and search disparate directories over the Internet.
MADD (Major Department and Degree) - Refers to a multifunctional mainframe file that stores data on all University academic units. It identifies department numbers and names, if majors are offered, degrees offered, degree titles, certificates, CIPS codes, course offering status, budget department number, and colleges associated with the department/major.
MAUI (Made at University of Iowa) - Project MAUI is the new student information system implementation project that will replace the various existing systems within the administrative offices of the Provost units.
MARS (Manage Academic Revenue System) - The current web-based system which assesses student Tuition and Fees, accepts Financial Aid awards and applies same to assessed fees, accepts charges for student/staff bills from many University departments, prepares and disperses the University bill on a monthly basis and accepts payments to be applied to the bill.
MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) - Software that allows "message" exchange between applications in a distributed environment. Messages can contain data, request or both.
NAMS (Name and Address Management System) - The legacy mainframe application that manages the university central name and address database.
ODS (Operational Data Store) - A type of database often used as an interim to the data warehouse for reporting purposes. An ODS is designed to perform relatively simple queries on small amounts of data, rather than the complex queries on large amounts of data typical of the data warehouse.
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) - A class of applications that facilitates data mining or the discovery of trends and relationships in data.
OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) - A class of databases that facilitates and manages transaction-oriented applications.
Osiris - Administrative version of ISIS that provides the same features to faculty and staff. In addition, Osiris is used to gather input, such as instructor information and grades.
Portal - A web site that aggregates a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, self-service and business transactions.
Portlets - Specialized pluggable modules that are designed to allow applications to execute inside a portal server.
PLT (Project Leadership Team) - Responsible for planning, executing, and coordinating the implementation and deployment of MAUI. They oversee the implementation of all modules and components and are responsible for project planning and management, implementation strategies, communications/coordination among project participants and campus, and guidance in the design, development, and deployment of the software.
redLantern - In June 2008, the operational unit for the DARS suite of products was renamed redLantern. At the same time, redLantern rebranded the DARS suite of products into three distinct pieces of software: u.achieve (Degree Audit and Transfer Course Articulation), u.select (formerly CAS, the Course Applicability System) and u.direct (formerly the Degree Completion Planner). Project MAUI will implement the u.achieve software, with intentions to begin licensing the u.select software at a future date. In March 2009, Miami University sold the software intellectual property rights of this suite of products to CollegeSource, Inc. The newly rebranded products will continue to be known as u.achieve, u.select and u.direct under the redLantern umbrella. http://www.redlanternu.com/
RSS Channels Rich Site Summary Channels - A container for a collection of related items. RSS Channels are typically used to enable Web publishers to provide a summary of their site in a standard XML format. Channels will normally include news or spotlight items, but they can include links to any content at your site or other sites.
Servlets - A J2EE technology that provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems.
Sockets - A very low level point-to-point communication protocol.
SQL (Structure Query Language) - A type of programming language used to construct database queries, perform updates, and other maintenance of relational databases.
Steering Committee - see Executive Steering Committee.
STUDY (Correspondence Study Information Management System) - The legacy mainframe system used to manage all aspects of GIS (Guided Independent Study) including enrolling students, paying instructors, and tracking lessons and exams, as well as the scheduling of exams. STUDY was retired in August 2008.
Tomcat - An open source web application server that supports J2EE Servlets, JSP technologies and APIs. http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html
u.achieve - The suite of products formerly know as DARS by Miami University has been rebranded as u.achieve (Degree Audit and Transfer Course Articulation), u.select (formerly DAS, the Course Applicability System) and u.direct (formerly the Degree Completion Planner). As part of Project MAUI, the u.achieve product will replace the DELI mainframe application. The basic requirements and sub-requirements of a degree program within u.achieve are the same as DARS (DELI) and the resulting output will look quite familiar. Upgrading will allow more flexibility in the degree audit display contents of ISIS and MAUI.
u.achieve 4.0 release - The latest version of DARwin, which is the first version of the DARS black box evaluation engine written in the java programming language. This is the release used in the implementation plan. Past releases of the DARS product have been either PL/1 (which is the version used for DELI) or in COBOL. The u.achieve 4.0 release was chosen over COBOL due to the staff's expertise with java.
Web-based - Applications that are accessed with a web browser over the internet.
Web Services - A standards based suite of technologies (XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) designed to support interoperable applications to application interactions over a network.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) - A meta-language for defining and creating specialized markup languages. These create portable data interchange formats that can be used to transmit data between applications.