Project Topics (Suggestions)

Ideas for statistical term-papers, survey papers and software demo projects follow.

A Sample Statitical Term-Paper

Statistically summarize the publication activity across different research topics (or validation methodologies used) in database forums in last 5 to 10 years. Several conference proceedings and journals are available on-line from VLDB, SIGMOD and DBLP websites. You can choose a sample subset of publication forms. It may be helpful to prepare a summary chart (e.g. Figure 3, pp. 656, textbook) to show the change in number of publications on each topic by the year in conferences and journals. Similar statistics on the methodology of choice would be useful. You are welcome of think of other informative statistical (and data mining, knowledge discovery) tools and techniques to highlight trends. The term paper should document the major results as well as the data collection and analysis procedures.

Survey Papers

Survey the publications within a specific research topics within database forums in last 5 to 10 years. Sample topics include temporal dataases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, mobile computing and databases, data warehouses, web databases, etc. You may find more topics from the call for papers (see SIGMOD website) from latest conferences on databases. You may consider updating a recent survey paper. This will reduce your literature survey work to the publications since the selected survey paper was prepared (usually a year before publication). Extensive sources for survey papers include ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Computer (e.g. Embedded Databases survey in 9/2000 issue), and Communications of the ACM. A recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Eng. (January 1999) also featured a number of survey papers on database topics. Conferences often feature tutorials on special topics and the notes (if available) can be useful sources. The term paper shouls summarize major accomplishments and next challanges. The format of the survey paper may resemble those used in survey papers presented in chapter 9 of the textbook or other survey papers.

A Sample Software Demo Project

An interesting project relates to DBMS for personal information management (PIM) which is descibed briefly in section 4.2 of T9.3 at pp. 675 of textbook. This project may be structured by addressing the following questions:

Describe a typical day in your life. Identify the information and querying needs to support the major activities. (Are some of these geographic in nature?)
Propose a benchmark for designing and evaluating a DBMS for PIMs by identifying the key datasets, data types, computations and queries.
Consider the hardware and software platforms (e.g. Personal Digital Assitants or PDAs) mentioned in the paper. Compare the characteristics (e.g. CPU, Storage, Communication) of these devices with those of typical computers hosting traditional DBMSs.
List the potential impact of the unique characteristics of PDAs on the design of DBMSs. It may help to decompose this problem by the components of traditional DBMSs.
Identify the key design issues in designing PIM DBMS on PDAs. Select the 5 most critical decisions.
List alternative ways of resolving the top 5 design issues. Restrict your choices to 2 to 3 alternative for each design issue.
Compare the alternatives for one of the design issue. Identify the comparison methodology. List preliminary results characterizing the dominance zone of the alternatives.
Develop a prototype to demonstrate your work and write a short paper documenting the key findings.

Other software prototype development projects can be developed using similar steps.

Spatial Databases Term-Papers and Projects

As you already know, the instructor's research interests lie in the area of spatial databases and spatial data mining. Some of the current projects in this area are listed at Problems of Current Interest. You are welcome to chose a project related to these problems and interact with the spatial database research group. Other faculty members with reesarch projects in database area include Prof. John Carlis, Prof. Jaideep Srivastava, and Prof. John Riedl. You are encouraged to visit them and browse their web-pages to learn about their research projects. You may find interesting ideas for course projects this way.