CS 411 Project Page

Spring 2006

Each graduate student taking the course for 1 unit is required to do an extra project. If you take the course for .75 unit, you are not required to do the extra project, only the database application project.

Description of the Extra Project for Grad. Students

All students in the class are required to do this project.

Project Description

Students in teams of 3 to 4 are required to select an application that needs a database and build a database application from start to finish. There is no restriction on who can team up with whom: graduate students can team up with undergraduate, and on-campus students with off-campus.

Goals

Finding an application for which database systems would be required

Modeling the domain of the application, and defining the application functionalities

Designing and implementing the schema

Populating the database (this should not be the main focus of the project)

Writing the code needed to embed the database system in the application.

Schedule

There are a number of intermediate deadlines that you must meet in order to ensure a successful project. The intermediate deadlines are there to ensure that you don't delay everything until the last minute.

For Stages 2-4, you will submit hardcopy reports which we will grade. Please make sure to keep the graded reports and attach it to the final report, which you will submit in Stage 5.

• Feb 7: Group information due (Stage 1)
• Feb 21: Initial ER design due (Stage 2)
• March 16: Relational schema and revised ER due (Stage 3)
• April 18: Screen shots of application (Stage 4)
• May 3 and May 4: Demo and final writeup due (Stage 5)

Suggested Application Domains (subject to change)

You are free to propose domains that you want to work on. You can also pick one of the suggested domains below:

Movies domain:

In this domain you would be modeling entities movies, their actors, directors, genres, playing times, reviews, and so on. There exist several sources on the WWW from which you can get data to populate such a database. You can support various queries such as finding specific playing times, finding movies playing in Urbana-Champaign, 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.

Books domain:

In this domain you would be modeling 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, similar to the one for movies is also a possibility. Pointing an interested buyer to a web source to buy a book is also an interesting option.

Apartments:

This domain would require modeling apartments and their properties, areas of town and their various properties (e.g., bus lines, crime rate distance from various landmarks). You would provide an interface for offering apartments for rent, finding apartments.