INFO 366 Project Description
(1) Project should be done in a group.
a) Choose a group for your project.
b) Each group should consist of three or four people.
c) Each group must submit a proposal.
(2) Read recommended project topics in the following pages. Choose a topic from the list or select one of your own per group.
(3) The project proposal should include, but need not be limited to:
a) Application development
i) Title (Short, but meaningful)
ii) Statement of Purpose and Scope (what does it do? why is it important?)
iii) Requirements
iv) Analysis of Current System (if there are current systems)
v) Sample Inputs and Outputs of the system. (This does not need to be done in a table format. Just a few sentences describing the data.)
vi) Deliverables
vii) Possible references
viii) The plan of each member’s contribution
b) Research/Survey
i) Title (Short, but meaningful)
ii) Statement of Purpose and Scope (what will it include? why is it important?)
iii) Possible references
iv) The plan of each member’s contribution
(4) Project Due Date
a) Proposal: at class or online in Week 4
b) Final report: Final Exam Week
An important part of the course is the term project. The project is a term-long work of your own. The term project type could be one of three categories – Application Development, Research paper, and Survey paper. If you are new to DB topics, I recommend you choose Application Development category. You will learn most from the category.
You can choose one topic of the three categories for your term project. The purpose of this project list is to provide you with some choices of different aspects of database systems, both theoretically and practically. The project should be done as a group of three or four. You have to specify the parts done by each member of the group in your final project report. Each group must submit a proposal.
A. Application Development
Design a proper database and implement the design using commercial software such as MS Access, MS SQL, My SQL and Oracle. The purpose of this category is to let you design and implement a small-sized application. First develop an EER diagram for a problem and then convert them into a relational schema. Develop a menu-oriented user interface and make the program work correctly for all types of input. Use your own data to check for the correctness of the program. The minimum requirement is to implement an application with at least four tables. You should implement entity, primary, and referential integrity constraints. You should implement a certain number of meaningful forms, queries, and reports, respectively.
Consider your specific application before you decide which RDBMS you want to use.
Some considerations are:
- Will this database 'live' beyond the time of this term?
- Whether you design a database for personal use or for your work-life?
- Who are your intended users?
- Do they know SQL? Using MS Access allows you to shield the user from understanding the structure of the database or the command language to manipulate the data. Conversely, it also protects the integrity of the data from inexperienced users. However if you are the only user, you will gain great experience in SQL by choosing Oracle, My SQL or MS SQL Server.
Emphasis will be placed on the database design, the documentation, and the development of the physical structures (which includes the implementation of the various constraints intended to maintain data integrity and database indexing). A few queries, forms, and reports are expected to be implemented, but not exhaustively.
Some examples of this category include:
• Medical Database (MDB): Implement a web-based system for the operations of the Drexel University College of Medicine Department of Surgery, dealing with treatments, etc. It tracks and coordinates the patient information including their procedures, the payments, and the funds from different department and organization. (A customer of MDB will be a medical doctor who is a professor in the College of Medicine.)
• Agent Program for WWW Information Extraction: Write a program to extract meaningful information from WWW, such as bioinformatics data, web content, and web structure, or from text, such as medical informatics data, clinical outcomes.
• Personal Consultant System (PCS): Design and implement a system for the operations of a small consulting company, assuming there are only 3-4 consultants. You need to implement a menu-oriented system with the features for customers, projects, expenses, account-billing and payments. Some interesting queries/reports are:
- Keep track of all the expenses/payments for a customer/project
- Find all customers with outstanding balances
- Generate a summary report for each customer/project with all the expenses and payments
- Generate bills (use mail-merge technique)
• Simplified Accounting Management System (SAMS): A small accounting company would like to create a simplified accounting management system (SAMS) for the operation of the office. SAMS will keep track of clients, their dependants, billable items, invoices, and payments. SAMS will not include other office-related activities such as purchasing office supplies, office expenses, or other complex tax-related matters.
• Multimedia Database Systems: Using a commercial tool, implement a multimedia database system in any application area such as images, photos, songs, museum, realtor, travel agency, video clips, etc. You can use commercial multimedia database tools that can handle images, sounds, and video.
B. Report/Survey/Research Topics
Study the state of the art and/or the state of practice for one of the chosen topics. The deliverables will be a technical report. Two types of students can choose this topic.
· The first type of students is those who will not be a DB designer or developer, but who wants to learn/understand DB technology.
· The second type of students is those who would like to publish their research work. A research category should have some meaningful substances in the final report. Write an about 20 pages (double space, time 12 font) report for a topic. A survey should be up-to-date and comprehensive, including as many summary tables and figures as possible, and should discuss strength and weakness of approaches or systems. A research topic should be narrowly defined to be doable in one term.
In both cases, reports must have a good structure in contents. References should be properly cited in the body of the report and listed at the end of the report. If in doubt, ask me.
Some examples of this category include:
· Recent development and trends in Big Data
· Recovery techniques in Databases
· Concurrency Control techniques in Databases
· Grid computing: Do a survey on GRID computing (http://www.grid.org/home.htm).
• Personal Information Management: Do a survey on Personal Information Management.
• Web Services: Do a survey on Web Service and its implementations.
(Web Services Security and/or Quality of Service (QOS) are also good topics)
• Semantic Web Personalization: Do a survey on personalization, and its usage to build intelligent systems.
• Information Extraction/Knowledge Discovery from WWW: Do a survey on information extraction, retrieval and knowledge discovery from WWW.
• DB Technology applied to WWW: Do a survey on the use of DB used for WWW research.
• DB Technology for Biomedical Research: Do a survey on the use of DB and data mining technology used for biomedical research.
• DB Technology for Cyberforensics: Do a survey on the use of DB technology used for cyberforensics.
• Storage and Retrieval of Image/Video Data: Survey the technologies and systems for archival and retrieval of image/video data.
• Google Desktop Search: Survey the techniques of Google Desktop Search.
· Big Data platform and techniques such as Hadoop, SPARK etc
• DB Design for E-Commerce (or Semantic web for E-commerce): Study the issues and techniques for database modeling and design for E-business (customer, merchandise, billing, shipping, etc), handling of security such as credit card and SSN, return policy and procedures, etc. You may also do a small case study for an E-commerce environment. Other Issues could include the handling of multimedia and semi-structured data, translation of paper catalog into a Web database, DB design supporting user interface (navigation, hyperlinks, store layout, FAQ, helps, services, policies, shopping cart metaphor, …), schema and data evolution (category of products, naming, prices, …)
• A Case Study of Real-World Web-based System: Do an in-depth case study of a real-world web-based system such as YAHOO.COM, GOOGLE.COM, AMAZON.COM, EBAY.COM, MICROSOFT.COM, etc. Study the use web technology, DB technology, architecture, maintenance of the web site or resources, etc.
C. Your Own Topic
If you have your own topic in any category (application, survey, research), write a proposal and get an approval.
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