Repository for academic documents, algorithms and data: A utility in an educational context

Abstract

Data repositories currently constitute essential programs within institutions. In fact, universities are the primary institutions that promote the creation, management and storage for the safekeeping of a variety of documents, data and/or projects. This work is carried out within the framework of institutional need and the application of knowledge by the students and professors in the software degree program at a university in Ecuador. This project centers on a web application that makes it possible to manage, upload and download resources. This initial version focuses on the resources related to academic projects, data sets and algorithms. The scalability characteristics have been carefully introduced to ensure a progressive evolution of other types of resources and functionalities, in accordance with educational needs. Several aspects of the web interfaces are based on the characteristics of other existing repositories, and a series of tests related to functionality have been conducted in order to move beyond the introductory stage of use, to begin with, by the university community. This project is carried out according to a conception based on contributions, in which the agents, in principle, are members of the institution. The intensive and collaborative use of this utility will contribute to the growth of a data culture within the institution. Furthermore, the collection and organization of data for the purposes of study and research by the different university degree programs makes it possible to analyze and contrast them from different perspectives.