Project Information

Schedule

• October 5: 2-page proposal due. This should include:
  • What problem(s) you want to solve,
  • What is going to be new and challenging about it,
  • How you will try to solve the problem(s)
  • What problems you don't consider to be part of the project (i.e., non-goals)
  • What resources you need that you don't already have
  • Who is on your team if you are working in a team. Teams are strongly encouraged
• Week of October 5: feedback on proposal returned to you
• November 2: 4-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. Note that this checkpoint is largely a chance for you to get the feedback that you need. While it is not graded, students who have not made a good effort on this checkpoint often wind up not making good effort on the project overall and thus not doing well.
• Week of November 9: feedback on status report returned to you
• November 25 - December 2: Project presentations. Precise schedule TBD (it's first come first served via requests that are e-mailed to me --- requests only accepted after proposals are turned in), but everyone should be prepared for November 25. Your presentation should be ~15 minutes long. Here is what I expect out of the presentation (not necessarily in this order):
  • A good description of what the project is (inputs, outputs, etc.)
  • The motivation for why this project is interesting - why did you choose to do it, and why should we care about the problem
  • A discussion of what makes this project non-trivial (especially for the more research-oriented projects)
  • A description of how the project fits into the context of the class
  • A presentation of the results thus far
  • A discussion of what results you expect to get by the project deadline
  • A discussion of the difficulties or surprises that you had when working on the project
  • If your project is in a group, everyone must speak.
• Tuesday, December 8 - 5:00pm

  Final report due. Your final project report is due, along with a group evaluation for those working in groups (see below). The final report must be a full-length conference-style paper discussing your project. (It should be roughly equivalent to 10-14 single column pages. Note that this is a rough guideline. It is okay to go a bit over this, particularly if you're working in a large group - this is just meant to help you decide if you're in the right ball park.) You should model your paper on some of the papers we've read this term. Either PDF by e-mail or a hard copy in my box is fine. If you give a hard copy, I'd appreciate an e-mail letting me know that you've turned it in. Note that I don't care about the format; I only specify the length in single column pages because otherwise people ask if I mean single or double column pages. The goal of saying "conference style paper" is that I want you to include things like:

  • Motivate the problem that you're working on
  • Provide an example of a scenario where you'd use your solution
  • Tell me about the solution that you've created, this includes telling me about what makes the problem interesting and hard. If you'd like, you can interpret this as telling me what problems you ran into.
  • Relate it to related work
  • Tell me about potential future work - even if you have no intension of ever doing it. Just like in a real conference paper, the goal is for you to show that you know what some of the flaws are with your system, even if you have no intension of solving them. ;)
  Note that some of you won't actually create a solution, but just explore the literature, which is fine. In this case, your job is to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, and, if you feel like there's an obvious choice, say what you would do if you were going to implement a solution to the problem. Note that I do not care about the layout.

  In addition to the report, I want each person who is working on a project in a group to SEPARATELY turn in a report on how they felt that all of the group members (yourself included) contributed to the project. Useful information is: what parts of the project you did (e.g., if you divided the work by sections, who did what section), how many hours you estimated that you worked, and how well you feel like you and the other people in the project did.

Project Ideas

• 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.
• A research project that I am working on, involving the Universities of British Columbia, Ottawa, and Toronto as well as SAP/Business Objects, aims at conducting a proof-of-concept study of a requirements-driven data warehouse construction. It proposes a first step towards a new long term vision: a top-down data warehousing design-time as well as a run-time process where (mostly non-technical) users need only to focus on the declarative specification of application requirements at design-time, and a tool will (semi)automatically generate and populate an underlying data warehouse at run-time. Two specific tasks to be solved are: first, design a conceptual integration modeling language for representing typical integration features such as data provenance, data access requirements for materialization, and mappings from the conceptual model to the underlying multidimensional model; second, build a prototype tool that uses models expressed in the conceptual integration model modeling language to drive the design and the population of a data warehouse. Expected results of this research will be a contribution to the Canadian Business Intelligence industry. Data warehousing is one of the cornerstones of the industry, so research advancing data warehousing will be crucial to the flagship Canadian software companies that currently lead the industry. There are several sub-projects that could be investigated as a course project:
  • Cube ER will have an XML-like internal representation. This internal representation is an extension of Microsoft's EDM model (called Cube EDM) with multidimensional concepts. The tool will allow a designer to create graphical models of data integration artifacts at the conceptual level. Once a Cube ER model is created, the designer should be able to use the tool for generating a Cube EDM counterpart. The tool must also allow the generation of a Cube ER visualization, given a Cube EDM model.
  • Implement an incremental version of the Cube EDM generation and visualization tool. Here, the tool must be able to add changes to the models without regenerating the latter from scratch.
• DB Jobs is a website to help people get database jobs. Right now, it's a pretty straightforward PHP implementation; users post jobs to the site, and other users look for the jobs. Separately, these postings are also often posted to DB World. Look into some Web 2.0 technology (e.g., RSS feed, or automatically pulling the listing from DB World), describe what the technology is supposed to do, implement said technology for DB Jobs, and then report on how it worked and/or if you were going to change the technology, how would you change it and why.
• Peer data management systems (which we will discuss in class) are an extension of P2P to the richer semantics of databases. I have some research on creating mappings between the sources to allow the translation of the queries, as well as how to translate the queries. This research could use more experimental analysis. I would tell you what to do, and you would run the experiments as well as learn some of the theory (bonus: you could get a publication out of the matter).
• Throughout this course, we'll talk 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.

A word on plagiarism

What does this mean precisely? Let's say that this webpage is your source [1]. If you were writing something about the first paragraph, it might look something like the following:

504 includes a class project which can be done either individually or in groups [1]. Overall, it shouldn't be too bad, in particular, "it should not eat your life"[1].

If you find yourself thinking "there's no point in my writing this differently, the source that I'm looking at has written it better than I could", I offer you the following words of wisdom (1) I don't care if they wrote it better, you can't plagiarize (2) in each case where I have detected plagiarism, the plagiarized sections are the WORST part of the paper, since they are generally just cut and pasted from other sources without regard to the context that the project is supposed to be about. So do us both a favour, save us both a lot of grief, and don't do it. You'll learn more and turn in a better result.

Resources

• DBLP is a fantastic bibliography and link to papers for database and logic programming.
• Google Scholar also has a search engine that can be quite helpful since it indexes more than just the metadata about the paper

Conferences:

• SIGMOD
• PODS (theory)
• VLDB
• EDBT
• ICDE

• TODS
• VLDB Journal
• TKDE

Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address:
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