User management in an educational computer system: personal information management

Recently, almost all universities and colleges have introduced educational computer systems designed to process their information. These systems are used not only for lectures but also for campus life. All students should be registered in the systems, which means an enormous number of users would have to be registered. This paper characterizes these registration methods, and introduces a personal information management system for supporting management within the educational systems. A prototype Whoswho system has been developed for managing personal information. An experiment in the Educational Center for Information Processing at Kyushu University is reported. The results show that the Whoswho system is useful for retrieving personal information and for publishing personal information by users world-wide.