COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM
(CASE STUDY COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT)
USMAN MUJAHID MUHAMMAD
FPTB/CS/HND/19/136534
FEDERAL POLYTECHNIC BAUCHI
SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Abstract - The notion of a collaborative
information system refers to systems and practices
allowing a group of users to seek share and
retrieve information to achieve similar
information-related goals. Despite an increasing
adoption in social environments, collaboration
behavior in information seeking and retrieval is
mainly limited to small-sized groups, generally
restricted to working spaces. Much remains to be
learned about collaborative information systems
within open web social spaces. This project is an
attempt to solve the problem of collaboration
between lecturers and students in the Department
of Computer Science at Federal Polytechnic
Bauchi. The project is used to collect assignments
and projects electronically for supervision.
1. INTRODUCTION
Working with others within an organization can
have a variety of positive effects, and there are
many benefits of collaboration in the workplace.
Collaborative workers benefit from the diverse
contributions of members with different
backgrounds, roles, attitudes, and interests, all of
whom contribute to the richness of the cooperative
effort (Baeza, 2018).
The facility of collaboration enables students'
development of the ability to collaborate in their
group work (Meloche & Dalton, 2017). Even
though several students have worked together on
group projects in collaboration and this has been
shown to increase the learning and retention of
information. Instructors and academic librarians
may have mostly overlooked the growing
importance of collaborative activities in learning
environments (Shah, 2019).
Computer Science Department
The Department of Computer Science (formerly
called Computer Centre) was established in
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
mmusman.1365634@fptb.edu.ng
SUBMITTED TO
Mrs. BENISEMENI ESTHER ZAKKA
September 1986 within the School of General
Studies. At inception, the department was only a
service department to other departments in
computer-related courses, presently the department
is under the School of Science and Technology.
The Department runs a National Diploma and
Certificate program in Computer Science as well as
short time courses on computer-related fields of
study. It has a staff strength of nineteen (19)
academic staff, seven (7) non-academic staff, and a
Youth Corps member.
The Department has been headed at various times
by the following Head of Department (HOD):
1. Mr. C.I. Okoye 1986 – 1993
2. Mr. K.I. Larson (Ag) 1993 – 1993
3. Mr. IshayaAudu 1993 – 1994
4. Mrs. Rakiya Mahdi 1994 – 2004
5. Mal. Sani Usman 2004 – 2018
6. Mal. Ahmed Maidorawa 2018 – Date
Programs
Apart from being a service department to all the
departments of the Polytechnic, the department
currently runs ND and HND programs leading to
the award of Higher National Diploma and National
Diploma certificates. These programs are designed
to produce middle-level manpower computer
professionals, capable of applying the use of
computers in different areas such as computing
services and Information and Communication
Technology. The department also runs a certificate
course in computer science and short computer
appreciation programs for non-computer
professionals.
These are designed to enable interested candidates
to be acquainted with practical knowledge of some
basic computing, basic hardware maintenance,
software development, and its application.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Introduction
This literature review discusses research that
supports the development of the research design.
This research provides a background of
collaborative information behavior, the level of
collaboration, and how the concepts have been
studied. The review also explores previous research
focused on the information-seeking process of
individuals.
2.2 Theoretical Framework
Based on the previous study of collaborative
information systems, seen as the cornerstone of
collaboration, one can reasonably ask about the
contents of such a system: which knowledge should
be available to define this collaborative information
system? What concrete characteristics of the
network and partners should be assembled to be in a
position to design this Collaborative Information
System?
2.2.1 Definitions of Collaboration
To critically research Collaborative Information
systems, it is important to have a clear
understanding of the concept of collaboration.
Collaboration has been studied in a wide variety of
disciplines, such as management, Computer
Science, Sociology, and Library Information
Science. Also, it continues to increase in frequency
and importance for solving complex scientific
problems and understanding various social issues
(Sonnenwald, 2019). Therefore, the definition
varies with each discipline. The collaboration
focuses on the process of working together. As a
philosophy of interaction, collaboration considers
an individual's responsibility for their actions,
including learning and respecting the abilities and
contributions of their peers (Zhao & Li, 2018).
Chrislip & Larson (2017) defined collaboration as a
commonly useful relationship between two or more
people who work to achieve the same objectives by
sharing a task, ability, and responsibility for
accomplishing outcomes.
Collaboration has been identified as having two
parts, focusing on collaboration within an
organization and among individuals (Hara &
Solomon, 2017). In business and management,
collaboration is commonly considered from an
organizational perspective. Mattessich & Monsey
(2018) viewed collaboration as "a mutually
beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into
by two or more organizations to achieve common
goals".
Kagan (2019) described the collaboration as the
structure of an organization where information
resources, rules, and authority are shared.
Generally, these definitions characterize
collaboration as involving individuals in
organizations who are responsible for activities
intended to achieve common goals through shared
information resources or authority.
Schrage (2018) viewed collaboration as the process
of shared conception in which two or more
individuals with interrelated skills interact to build a
shared understanding. (Iivonen et al, 2018) also
defined collaboration as "human behavior that
facilitates the sharing of meaning and completion of
activities concerning a mutually shared super-
ordinate goal and which takes place in a particular
social, or work, setting". These definitions can be
summarized as having two common elements:
working together for a joint purpose and sharing
meaning, resources, knowledge, and responsibility
(Hara, E.2019). These previous studies have shown
that there are a variety of definitions of
collaboration that can be broadly characterized as an
activity for solving a complex problem or achieving
a work task among two or more people. In addition,
various factors can be used to attain effective
collaboration, such as full integration and
communication. For this study, collaboration was
defined by (Iivonen, 2018) as focusing on
interactions among individuals to share meaning,
knowledge, or information resources to accomplish
common goals and solve complex problems.
2.2.2 Overview of Information System
According to Brien (2018), Information systems are
the collection of hardware, software, People,
procedure, and data. They work together to provide
information essential to running an organization.
Kim (2019) Information system as the assemblage
of collection of machines, ideas, people, and
activities, that gather and process data to meet the
requirement of an organization. The machines are
electronic/electrochemical equipment that accepts
instructions in many forms from many sources. The
people are clerks, operators, analysts, and
programmers who work directly in the department
or division and supply data or use the information
contained in the processed data or the information
contain in the processed reports.
Describes that, a human resources information
system has to eliminate redundant data, and
administrative costs and permit greater utilization of
human resources. He demonstrated that indeed, the
microcomputer-based information system gives the
management instant access to all kinds of student
information, thereby making it possible to answer
students' records. The information may differ from
one institution to another, such as information might
include demographic (age, sex, home, town), level,
department, registration number, etc., hence a
systematic and collective, organization,
documentation, and retrieval of data often require a
data processing with real-time processing facilities
and direct access to the database, information
system in this regard makes the stored data and
information available to users.
2.2.3 Importance of Information
According to Shah, (2019) information is data that
has been organized and communicated. The record
of a student research project gives information on
what solution has been provided to a particular
problem, this information in turn gives what is
called knowledge (this involves the use of
application for a reason). Therefore, knowledge is a
result of reasoned analysis of information of a set of
the organized statement of facts or ideas,
communicated in some systematic form. This
simply means that information about the student
research project, knowledge is applied to some
extent to improve maintenance, upgrade situations,
or activities in the environment.
To achieve the goals of an information system, the
system has to incorporate some specialized
application programs. The application analyzes the
data and reduces them to a form that is to human
understanding. She further explains that the purpose
of the information is to support management
inquiries and it is not feasible to receive data by
specifying record keys that would be used. Weadell
(2018) information is summarizing data and
otherwise manipulated data that is useful for
decision making. Some characteristic of useful
information is that is relevant, timely, accurate,
concise, and complete. Further explain that for a
given database, there is a structural description of
the type of facts held in that database, the
description is known as schema. The schema
describes how the objects are presented in the
database and the relationship among them. There
are several ways of organizing a schema, which is
modeling the database structure and this is known
as database models (or data models).
2.3 Conceptual Framework
To understand collaboration in information systems,
it is necessary to review the related works of
collaborative information systems from a broader
aspect of a wide variety of disciplines, such as the
general concept of collaboration in management,
computer science, sociology, and science, with a
focused view on collaboration and information
system. Therefore, this section is a review of studies
from previous literature that discuss what
collaboration means in a variety of contexts, the
principles of collaboration, and the actual practice
of collaboration in an information system. This
supports the identification of what is considered in
collaboration in information system behavior and
provides insights into research trends on
collaboration in information system behavior
(Wilson, 2018).
2.3.1 Internet Technology
Internet technology is the ability of the Internet to
transmit information and data through different
servers and systems. Internet technology is
important in many different industries because it
allows people to communicate with each other
through means that were not necessarily available.
The Internet is essentially a large database where
information can be passed and transmitted. It can be
passively passed along in the form of non-
interactive websites and blogs; it can also be
actively passed along in the form of file sharing and
document loading. Internet technology has led to a
wealth of information available to anyone who can
access the Internet. It has allowed people who were
accustomed to textbooks and libraries to learn
anything they could want from the comfort of a
computer.
An intranet is a private network that can only be
accessed by authorized users. The prefix "intra"
means "internal" and therefore implies an intranet is
designed for internal communications. "Inter" (as on
the Internet) means "between" or "among." Since
there is only one Internet, the word "Internet" is
capitalized (Shah, 2019).
2.3.2 Web Technology
Web technologies are a general term referring to the
many languages and multimedia packages that are
used in conjunction with one another, to produce
dynamic websites. Each separate technology is
fairly limited on its own and tends to require the
dual use of at least one other such technology.
Therefore, we can conclude that all of the
components that make up a site are interdependent
on one another. Some of these technologies include
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Dynamic
Hyper Text Markup Language (DHTML), and PHP.
1. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language): Is
the glue that holds together every website.
Like building a house, you always build a
strong foundation first. For any site, HTML
is that foundation. HTML is an open-source
language (i.e. not owned by anyone), which
is easy to learn, and requires no fancy (or
expensive!) packages to start using it. All
you need is something to type with, such as
Windows Notepad, and a lot of time and
patience.
2. DHTML (Dynamic HTML) is just as the
name suggests, it adds dynamic, moving, or
changing content to your plain old HTML
pages. Think of it as a more advanced
version of HTML, although DTHML is not
a programming language in itself. DHTML
is a broad term used to describe a group of
applications, the main ones are described
below:
 JavaScript: JavaScript is a 'scripting'
language. A bit like a script in a feature film,
it is used to decide 'what happens next. This
may be a sequence of screen events, where
one event is initiated by the end of another,
or it could be a programmed response to a
user interacting with the page in some way,
e.g. moving their mouse over a link.
JavaScript is a complex and powerful
language and may be placed directly inside
an HTML page, or in a separate JavaScript
file.
 CSS and CSS-P: CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets) is a relatively new language,
designed to expand upon the limited style
properties of HTML. Easy to learn and
implement, CSS is an excellent way to
control the style of your site, such as text
styles like size, color, and font.
iii. PHP (Personal Home Page): is an open-source
general-purpose server-side scripting language
originally designed for Web development to
produce dynamic web pages. It is one of the first
developed server-side scripting languages to be
embedded into an HTML source document rather
than calling an external file to process data. The
code is interpreted by the web server with a PHP
web processor module that generates the resulting
web page. It also has involved including a
command-line interface capability and can use a
stand-alone graphical application (Robson, 2018).
2.3.3 Database Management System (DBMS)
A DBMS is a necessity in an information system
environment for accurate, appropriate, flexible,
comprehensive, and accessible information. Robson
(2018) presented a database management system
(DBMS) as a set of software programs that controls
the development, use, and maintenance of the
database of a computer using organization.
A database is a collection of many related files,
more especially, the files are usually integrated,
meaning that the file is logically related, or cross-
reference to one another. Thus even though all data
elements on a topic are kept recorded in different
files. They can easily be organized and retrieved
with simple requests (Robson, 2018).
Alexis's (2019) database management system
(DBMS) is a computer-based record-keeping
system whose overall purpose is to record and
maintain information. A database management
system has been quoted in some quarters to be
better suited than programming language to deal
with storage, therefore, a data management system
(DBMS) is software for manipulating databases or a
data manager, a program that controls the structure
of database and access to the data.
2.3.3.1 The Role of Database in Information
Alexis, (2019) described a Database as a means of
storing and organizing in a specific order the data
records and files that are related to a particular
subject or purpose. A database can either be manual
or computerized (electronic). In the manual method,
records are stored in books, and papers are collected
in files. The electronic database, which is the
computerized database, is faster and much more
flexible than the manual database. In computerized
terms, a database is a collection of tables, queries,
forms, and reports. A table is set information about
a particular subject which includes rows and
columns of bio-data, a table contains a record, each
related to the subject of the table which contains a
record, related to the subject of the table (record
containing information on a particular student).
Each record is made up of fields, which contain
specific information things the record represents
each record in the bio-data table that contains
information of student has fields like name, and age
(Yue & He 2018).
Information concerned can be anything that is
defined to be significant to the organization's
system of serving that is anything that may be
necessary to the decision-making process involved
in the management of the institute. Therefore, the
element of the database remains the records and
files in the traditional files; the only difference is the
integration of these files. A database management
system (DBMS) as a computer-based record-
keeping may use sequential direct, indexed, or
standard files. Database management programs
have been so popular that they are now viewed as
general-purpose application software packages, like
word processing and spreadsheet packages. The
packages such as Microsoft Access, lotus approach,
or Corel paradox allow you to set up and manage
the database. In an information system, it involves a
set of people and resources that collects. Transforms
and disseminates information in an organization.
2.4 Conclusions
The result of this research is an application that can
handle the processing and storage of the final year
projects of the department of Computer science
Federal Polytechnic Bauchi. The major procedure
followed by the software package is the provision of
automated project record-keeping for the school of
science and technology. The data is saved into the
database for onward processing.
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