Project Information

One of the major components of this class is the project. The point of this project is to put into practice some of the ideas that you've been studying. You may do your project either alone or in groups of two to three. The amount of work expected from the project is commensurate with the number of people working on it (i.e., you personally are expected to put in the same amount of work on a project regardless of whether you're working alone or in a group).

(Tentative) Schedule

Tuesday, February 1: have formed your team by now, and emailed me who is on your team or if you're working on your own.
Thursday, February 10: 2-page proposal due; tell me what problem(s) you want to solve and how you think you will solve them, what problems you don't consider to be part of the project (i.e., non-goals), and any resources you need that you don't already have.
Tuesday, February 22: feedback on proposal returned to you
Thursday, March 3: 5-page midterm status report due; this should describe what you have done, what you have left to do, roadblocks you've encountered, interesting or unexpected questions or issues that uncovered, etc. Included in this report should be 2-3 pages of literature search for related work; this should include both a written component comparing your project to related work, as well as a bibliography
Week of March 7: feedback on status report returned to you
March 28 - April 4: Project presentations. Precise schedule TBD, but everyone should be prepared for March 28.
Tuesday, April 15: Final report due. Your final project report is due. The final report must be a full-length (10-14 page) conference-style paper discussing your project. You should model your paper on some of the papers we've read this term.

Project Ideas

Here are some ideas that would be appropriate for the course project. The best project ideas are likely to come from you; however, here are some that you can use as is or use to think of new ones. The projects can run the gamut from all theory to having a heavy implementation component. I'll add more project ideas as I come up with them.

Most database research topics that you would like to pursue. Keep in mind that I do mean research topics; implementing a database application does not qualify. Feel free to send me mail or come by to talk about what qualifies as a good project.
Throughout this course, we've been talking about how the concepts that we study relate to your data. Choose some part of your data that is difficult to manage using current data management techniques/software. Describe what would need to change in order for your data to be managed effectively. Relate to readings both in class and out of class.
Choose a model management operator, either one defined in one of the papers read in class or one you think should be defined. Define its behaviour based on previous work, and implement it. Note: an implementation may not be necessary if the work has a sufficiently rich theoretical component or is a sufficiently extensive survey of the area, but you must come and talk to me before assuming that your work falls into this category.
Investigate experiment management systems - report on what exists and possibly build one of your own. Does the state of the art treat this data similar to data managed in traditional databases? Should it, should it not?
We're discussing a lot of metadata applications, but we're not discussing many of the actual production systems that people are using to solve their metadata problems. Investigate the current solutions to a particular problem (e.g., data integration, data warehouse creation) and compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses.

[534A home] [grading] [schedule][project]

Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address: rap [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca

Office Location: CICSR 345
Phone: (604)822-0436
Fax:(604)822-5485
Postal/Courier address:
The Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
201-2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4
Canada