EwayDataCollect: Web Service-Based Data Collection Tool for Education System

In education system, there is a need to collect data from the education providers, to facilitate informative decision making by the policy makers. Data collection is handled using tools like questionnaires, online surveys, online forms submission, and Electronic Data Interchange. This paper presents, EwayDataCollect, a tool for online data collection in education system. EwayDataCollect leverages the web service technology for data collection. It uses web service interface which is interoperable and supports communication between heterogeneous environments. The tool enables computer to computer data collection of both, statistical and detailed data. It facilitates collection of data from any number of educational providers. EwayDataCollect consists of three components: (1) Eway-Invocation, (2) DCF-Dissemination, and (3) Eway-Processing. The first component is responsible for registering the data requestor, accepting Data Capture Format (DCF) and details like URLs and email-ids of data providers. The task of second component is to disseminate DCF to the data providers. The third component of tool collects filled DCF from the data provider's registered URL. The collected data is parsed and stored in a database. EwayDataCollect is faster and easier to use. EwayDataCollect architecture, implementation and application are presented in this paper.