Assignments of Semester 1 - 15 July, 2002 - 9 Nov, 2002

• Select one of the areas listed in the course outline. Within the selected area define a topic, which is of interest to you or your organization. Write a term paper about the defined topic in a form of a case study or a review paper.
• Conduct a literature survey of the topic
  
• Write a summary or abstract outlining the problem(s) and the objectives or significance of this paper
  
• Provide a general introduction to the topic
  
• Review the relevant literature highlighting the findings and the recommendations made by these studies
  
• Provide a concise discussion of critical issues that reflect the current situation (state of the art) and future developments in this area
  
• Provide a conclusion and lessons learned if any
• Provide a bibliography and supporting appendices if any
  

Assignments of Semester 2- 6 Jan, 2003 - 17 May, 2003

XML database; Object-Oriented database; Data warehouses; Mobile database; Database security; Database high availability; Other topics related to database system, applications and development environments are possible with consent from the instructor.

The focus of the report should be to provide an overview to your chosen topic. It should give the reader enough information to understand what the technology involves, its applications, its costs and benefits, existing products and so on. The style of writing should be pitched at an "intermediate" level, that is, it should be simple enough to be understood by someone with an introductory-level background in basic database principles, but at the same time also contain enough technical detail to properly understand how the technology works.

Students are encouraged to produce high quality work as all reports will be made available on the course web site for the benefit of the class.

Teams will conduct a 15-20 minute presentation on their chosen topic. This will be followed by a 5 minute question-and-answer session to allow for clarifications by students and the instructor.

• Specify the project & functional requirements.
• Submit a proposal & functional requirements to instructor.
• Perform data analysis using E-R diagrams.
• Design the database schema.
• Implement the database using Access (or MS SQL). Populate it with sample data.
• Design the application programs, query views, reports, and the query/input/update HTML forms.
• Implement the applications using the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.
• Obtain feedback from classmates & do fine-tuning.
• Complete a project report which must not be longer than 4 pages of text, single-spaced with 11-point font. Diagrams can occupy additional pages. Submit the final report. Install your Web database application on the ISLab2 server.

The report should include:
General description of the system; E-R diagram; Database schema; Description of the application programs and the functions provided; Description of problems encountered in the project, and how the system can be improved.

Develop an XML application to store a bibliography of journal articles, books, book chapters and conference papers, and to automatically format the references to appear in APA style on a Web page.

• Design an XML language to store the bibliography. Construct an example bibliography using your XML bibliography language. The instructor will provide you with example references to use – but you can start with the references given in http://islab.sas.ntu.edu.sg:8000/StudentInfo/Diss/2002-2003/apa.doc.
• Describe your XML bibliography language in words.
• Construct an XML schema for validating your bibliography documents.
• Construct an XSL-Transformation stylesheet to convert the references in your bibliography document to the APA citation style, for display as an XHTML file on a Web browser.
• Upload the above files to the course Web site. The instructor will provide instructions for this later in the semester.
  

Design and develop an information source, and implement it as a Web application for end-user access. Also implement a Web service for other systems to access your information source.

• Decide on the type of information source you want to set up, e.g. a bibliography of articles on a topic, a full-text database of articles, an online library catalogue, a directory of Web resources on a topic, basic information on a particular topic (e.g. gardening), e-commerce site, etc.
• Gather information for your information source (don’t spend much time on this – this is not the focus of the project)
• Design and construct a database or XML document to store the information
• Develop an application using ASP.NET for end-users to access the information
• Set up a Web service for other systems to access your information source.
• Upload your application to the course Web site
• Submit a written report of 4-6 pages of text, 11pt font single-spaced (any text beyond the first 6 pages will not be read) covering the following:
  · Description of your information source, and where you obtained the information
  · The design of your database or XML document
  · Description of the Web application that you developed for users to access the information
  · How the Web service was implemented.
  · How the work was apportioned between the 2 team members
  · The URL of your system on the course Web site
  

Many Web sites however, provide a wealth of information on Robocode from tutorials to discussion groups to fully-functional robots. These include IBM’s site as well as numerous other Robocode fan sites. You are encouraged to use these resources as inspiration. Plagiarism however will not be tolerated. The robots you develop must be your own creation. Although you may adapt existing strategies, the code used to implement them must be yours.

Since the IRS consists of two separate tasks, you will write separate programs for each of them. That is, one Java application will create the inverted index while another will perform query processing. All programs must perform appropriate exception handling.

Obtain a data set (of at least 200 records) and perform the knowledge discovery process to the data set using at least two of the following techniques:

• Statistical analysis
• Cluster analysis & K-Nearest Neighbour
• Association analysis
• Decision tree induction
• Neural network

Write and submit a report of your data analysis. (Max. 5 pages of text, excluding tables and appendices.)