A one page description of your project should be emailed to
susan@cis.upenn.edu by Oct.
12, 2004.
Students enrolled in CIS650 are expected to complete a term
project, due on the last day of class. The project can either be an
implementation project, or a paper on some topic related to the course.
Two excellent sources for finding research papers,
searchable by author or title, can be found at DBLP and CiteSeer
· Implementation project. Pick an idea, paper, or technique that you
are interested in and implement/extend it (some examples are below, some more
challenging than others). The project
should not only be demonstrated and evaluated but documented, i.e. you
should provide a short paper (5 page) describing what you have done and the
tradeoffs involved.
· Critical analysis paper.
A critical analysis of some problem area based on recent
papers in the database. The problem area may be one studied in class, but delved into in greater detail, or
a new topic area that you are interested in. The analysis should attempt to
answer the following questions: why is the problem important, what solutions
have been proposed, what assumptions have been made, are the assumptions
realistic, what are the reasons for making the assumptions, how can results in
this area be applied in practice, what are the directions for future research
in this area.
· Novel solution paper. Presenting your own solution to a problem. The paper should
clearly state the problem you are solving, the assumptions you are making, your
solution, and a brief survey of related literature. Any claims should be
substantiated.
All work should be done in groups of one or two people. If you have a team of two you must be able to
partition the work so that there is clear responsibility.
Non-implementation projects will involve a paper roughly 20
pages long (double spaced). In addition to containing the substance of your
project, it should contain an abstract (terse 100-200 word summary of the work
presented), an introduction (statement of problem and structure of the paper),
a conclusion (summary of major contributions and work remaining to be done),
and references to related research. The bibilography
should be in ACM or IEEE journal format.
Sample topics:
Active XML: Download the ActiveXML
implementation. Create an application
using it, or show how the concept can be used, for example: (1) to capture issues
of security and privacy, or (2) to optimize a (non-active) page refresh by
smart buffering, or (3) to implement replication and/or a distributed directory
structure.
A second, more research-oriented problem is the issue of
designing Active XML documents based on some analysis of how a static document
changes, analogous to designing a relational database given some knowledge of functional
dependencies. Come talk to me if you are
interested, I have some initial ideas along these lines.
A third, research/pragmatic, problem is that of determining substitute
or “equivalent” web services when some service call in an Active
XML document becomes “stale” or perhaps is just too slow to
respond. What types of fault tolerance
or recovery strategies should be adopted?
SQL with ranked
keyword search: Define a set of query language extensions/operations
to XQuery or SQL that support keywords. Build a middleware layer over a relational
database (Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL)
that takes queries in this language, creates and utilizes inverted indices or
other structures, and makes use of these structures to answer queries. The implementation should rank results using
TF/IDF or some other common ranked-results metric.
Two person project: As above, but also design and build a
web crawler for the keyword engine, which indexes not only documents, but also
meta-information (source web site, document date, document type, etc.)
Some suggested reading (there are more recent papers, you should search the web for them):
Florescu
et al. Integrating Keyword Search into
XML Query Processing. (WWW9)
Christos
Faloutsos and Douglas W. Oard. A Survey of Information Retrieval and Filtering Methods. Technical Report, University of Maryland, 1995.
Text extensions to SQL, e.g., those from SQL
Server
Query language for
linguistic applications: Linguists commonly annotate written text with
some form of linguistic analysis, for example grammatical structure. The resulting “parse tree” may
then be queried and/or updated by annotators.
Due to the tree-like structure, it is natural to consider tree languages
(XPath?) as a query language. However, since there is a large amount of this
annotated text, efficiency is imperative.
Balencing the two concerns of expressiveness
and efficiency, propose a query language for linguistic applications (I have
additional information here, contact me if interested).
Updating XML views: The last paper of the semester has been
partially implemented but there are some interesting components missing, in
particular with respect to insertion updates.
There is also the interesting question of how to encorporate
user suggestions to enable updates even when they are ambiguous. Send email to me if you are interested.
Braganholo et al. From XML View
Updates to Relational View Updates: old solutions to a new problem . International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB)
(2004).