Project Topics (Suggestions)

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

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. Some of the open problems are listed at List of Open Problems . 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.

A Sample Statistical Term-Paper

Statistically summarize the publication activity across different research topics (or validation methodologies used) in spatial database forums in last 5 to 10 years. Several conference proceedings (e.g. ACM GIS Workshops) and journals are available on-line from SIGMOD and DBLP websites. You can choose a sample subset of publication forms. It may be helpful to prepare a summary chart, spatial visualizations and other diagrams 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 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 topics within spatial databases such as conceptual modelling of spatial data, indexing and querying collections of moving objects, vector map compression, spatial data mining, spatio-temporal databases, mobile and wireless spatial databases, spatial data warehouses, internet based spatial databases, using spatial indexes for content based retrieval, etc. You may find more topics from the call for papers (see Symposium on Spatial Databases, or ACM Workshop on GIS, UCGIS Research Agenda websites) 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). UCGIS has a set of short position papers on emerging topics in spatial databases and Geographhic Information Systems. 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 spatial database topics. Conferences often feature tutorials on special topics and the notes (if available) can be useful sources. The term paper should summarize major accomplishments and next challanges. The format of the survey paper may resemble those used in survey papers presented in prestigious computer science journals mentioned above.

Sample Software Demo Projects

The research aspects of software demo project may be structured by addressing the following questions:

Functional Requirement analysis: Describe typical usage scenarios. Identify the information and computation needs to support the major activities. (Are some of these geographic in nature?)
Non-functional requirement analysis: Specify performance needs in areas like response time and throughput. Identify constraints posed by hardware and software platforms (e.g. Personal Digital Assitants or PDAs) if relevant.
Propose a benchmark for designing and evaluating the software applications by identifying the key datasets, data types, computations and queries.
Identify the key design issues in designing the software. Select the a few most critical decisions.
List alternative ways of resolving the top few 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.

Project 1

An interesting project relates to map based spatial database for personal information management (PIM) support typical GIS applications such as the following:

Browse a map of University campus
Locate and orient user on the map via visible landmarks around her
Locate specific buildings or departments in the University campus
Locate facilities (e.g. parking) near specific points of interests.
Request determination of a walking or driving route between two buildings on campus
Request landmark based directions for walk from a building to another

You may explore other aspects such as integration with a global positioning device (GPS), wireless communication to a web srever for dynamic loading of dataset, map compression etc.

Project 2

Evaluation of digital map data accuracy often starts with visual comparisons with references, e.g. aerial or satellite imagery. Goal of this project is to help visualize quality of a digital road map (e.g. TIGER files, or GPS tracks). Develop a prototype software to produce overlay of satellite imagery from terraserver.com and given digital map data for a small geographic area. A useful reading in this area is the report titled GPS TIGER Accuracy Analysis Tools (GTAAT) Evaluation and Test Results .