CS 4604 Course Project: Step 1

General Description

• Identifying an application area for which database systems would prove beneficial,
• Determining the functionalities of the application,
• Data Modeling (Identifying the classes, objects, roles, relationships, constraints etc.),
• Designing and perfecting the database schema,
• Populating the database and
• (most importantly) Writing the code needed to embed the database system in the application

Project Ideas

1. Nobel Awards Database: There actually exists one that is web-enabled here. The goal is to model and populate information about the awards made in the various fields (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine Literature, Peace and the Economic Sciences), the recipients, their countries, their year of birth etc. Your system should be able to answer questions such as "When was the first time an Asian won an award for the economic sciences?" and such cute things (the answer to this particular question is 1998). You could also work on variants of this idea; such as the recipients of the ACM awards (unfortunately, there is not too much information online about this). Interesting queries then could be "Name people who have won at least two different awards" (the answer would include Knuth, Thompson, Ritchie, Engelbart etc.) Or the people "who were ACM Fellows before becoming Turing Award Winners" and so on.
   
   
2. Books Database: This is yet another popular domain. You just need look at barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com for excellent examples. You could model entities such as books, their authors, topics (which may be a complex hierarchy). You may also model various attributes of the authors, the institutions they belong to, etc. You can support a buy/sell service of used books, books used in specific university courses. A personal profile of people (and the books they like) can be built and your database application could form the basis for a "recommender system", such as those supported by the commercial sites. The goal here is to "cluster" similar preferences together and the system can then make recommendations: "Since you liked Pride and Prejudice, I recommend that you try Sense and Sensibility, too".
   
   
3. Movies Database: There are several beautiful movie resources on the web, such as the hollywood.com movies site or the Internet Movie Database. You could model entities such as movies, their actors, directors, genres, playing times, reviews. There are several sources on the web from which you could get data to populate such a database. You can support various queries such as finding specific playing times, finding movies in Blacksburg directed by a given director. You can also support updates to the reviews section of the database (e.g., viewers giving their own opinions). Another functionality is to provide personal profiles of people (i.e., the movies they like) and then try to recommend movies to them based on profiles of viewers with similar tastes. Or you could go onto the OSCAR awards data or Golden Globe nominations etc. ("Find all the sitcoms that have been nominated three times in a row")
   
   
4. Apartment Homes: Our friendly neighborhood web guide is here. This domain would require modeling apartments and their attributes, areas of town and their various characteristics (e.g., BT bus lines, crime rate distance from various landmarks). You would provide an interface for offering apartments for rent, finding apartments based on various requirements ("gas heating + pets allowed + rent less than 500 + close to campus + BEV modem facility").
   
   
5. Research Literature: This domain involves modeling research publications. You need to identify the title of the publication, the forum it was published in, the authors, topics, keywords and related subtopic areas. This is a big business now (under the name of digital libraries). For example, the ACM digital library provides a beautiful searchable index (and retrievable repository, but that is beyond our scope) of nearly all of the publications of ACM (isn't that amazing). If you use this domain, then there are a lot of available resources for you to use. The ACM computing classification system provides a convenient hierarchial meta-index that you can use to organize your class hierarchy etc. If you are interested in a smaller domain, then the DBLP Bibliography Site provides a searchable facility for publications related to the database and programming communities. At the end of the day, you could identify papers written by a particular person at a particular place or ones in a narrowly defined area.
   
   
6. Web Sites: How do you think web search engines such as Google model their domain? You could think of them as a glorified database system where the basic entities modeled are web sites. You could then model their various properties: Topic, URL, domain name, other sites they link to, color of their background etc. Retrieval could be for sites that have similar characteristics and properties.
   
   
7. Others: Of course, there are a whole host of other ideas such as bank accounts, student records, NBA data, election results, Florida ballots, Chad-databases, senate demographics, car rentals, auto insurance, calling plans (sifting through the confusing 10-10-220 and all that stuff), consumer products, courses at Virginia Tech, hokie statistics, "match-making services" (:-)) and so on.

Deliverables

1. Form a team first and decide on a good application. It is preferable that every group focuses on a different application. To overcome conflicts, I recommend that you send an email to the TA (fmin@vt.edu) about your application and he would maintain a dynamic list of team members and their respective domains at this web page. Before sending him an email, make sure that your application is not already taken!
   
   
2. (100 points) Write a two page project proposal/description in the following format: (i) Name of the project and list of team members, (ii) What is the domain, (iii) What are the application specifications (i.e., what functionality will your completed system provide), (iv) What will be modeled by your system (and what will not), (v) What is the role of each project member in the project, (vi) What other "value-added" facilities could your system support (but that you will not build explicitly). The goal is for us to mutually agree on a do-able project. If you have questions, meet the instructor or the TA during their office hours.
   
   

Frequently Asked Questions

• Since this is a preliminary project proposal, how can we be sure what the role of each project member will be? How detailed should we get into this in our writeup?
  
  Answer: This is a good question. You don't have to "commit" to anything now; what we are looking for in this question is to see if any of the group members brings special talents/experiences to bear upon the project. For example, if you are building a botanical database and there is a student from the biology department in your group, (s)he can help identify bad design choices from a biology point of view. If one of you has experience in web-based software development, then that would be a good thing to mention. etc.
  
  
• Can we turnin the proposal as a Microsoft WORD document via email?
  
  Answer: No, please. I am glad you asked that before sending it in. I do not use Windows or Macs. I use a UNIX workstation. I cannot read documents in Word, Powerpoint, or one of those things. Please either give me a hardcopy or send the document in a neutral/friendly format (such as postscript or PDF or text or HTML).
  
  
• Do we have to draw some nice E/R modeling diagram or give ODL listing for our application? All within one week?
  
  Answer: No. We just need an English document that says what you will do and some details of what the functionality of the final system is. Believe us, you will have ample opportunity to do E/R, and all that stuff later on in the semester! :-)
  
  
• Can you explain what you mean by "value added facilities"?
  
  Answer: For example, in the books domain, this would mean the "recommender system" that makes selections of books for potential customers based on buying trends. In other words, the recommender system is a facility that will be enabled by the presence of a database system. This question is intended to set you thinking in larger-scope, out-of-the-box, and if you can explain potential advantages of databases from a user point of view. If you are an IS person for a corporate organization, you will frequently need to "justify" investing extra resources into developing something like a database/web-system etc. One way to do that is for you to think of what kinds of applications that a DB can "enable".
  
  
• In the part, "what will be modeled (and what will not)", what is expected?
  
  Answer: For example, in the books domain, you can write something like "We will model books, authors, publishers, and printers" but not "reviews, bookstores and sales figures". Just to be clear on what will be the final outcome.