CMPT 455 / 826 Information Modeling & Retrieval

Project Overview

Contents of this page

Introduction to the project
Stages of the project
Choosing a project
Examples of good projects

Introduction to the project

PLEASE REMEMBER: A major portion of your grade comes from the project. Therefore, it requires a significant amount of good work. A project needs to be a significant accomplishment for you, considerably beyond the material in your proposal.

This project requires students to investigate a related topic in greater detail than is covered in the class. Students are advised to discuss possible projects with the instructor prior to creating their proposal.

It is expected that your project will involve analyzing (researching / identifying needs), implementing (some contribution based on your analysis), and evaluating (the results of your implementation) some aspect of Accessible Computing at a level more advanced than that covered by the main portion of this class.

Stages of the project

The project is broken into the following stages to help you to be successful and to get your work done on time:

Each of these stages is described in detail in its own page.

Choosing a project

Most types of projects should not be too narrow. They should deal with some significant information modeling / retrieval issue. There are some examples of good project topics below.

You should choose a project where:

you have some interest in the topic, so that you will be motivated to do a good job
there is sufficient background information, so that you can do an informed job
there is some interesting problem still to be solved, so that you can do a productive job

PLEASE NOTE: It is highly recommended that you book a half hour appointment with the instructor at least a week before your proposal is due to discuss what might make a good topic for you.

Examples of good project topics:

PLEASE NOTE: These are not the only possible types of topics. Talk your ideas over with the instructor as soon as possible to help you to identify a good topic.

Projects could include:

More information focused topics such as:

identifying useful dimensions for analyzing information in a particular application area (e.g. identifying dimensions of content that could be useful in selecting appropriate media types for presenting the information in the most effective manner)
developing an ontology for a particular application area (e.g. developing an ontology of what makes music interesting)

More application architecture focused topics such as:

considering the needs for synchronizing independent databases with only a partial overlap between them (i.e. where only some of the data elements/records in each independent data base are of interest to or are sharable with the other database)
investigating how metadata can be used to encode transaction types as well as data content within transactions (i.e. this is already being done in the field of Electronic Data Interchange (edi) for purposes of supporting Business-to-Business e-Commerce)

More technology focused topics such as:

investigating how X-Open or CORBA architecture concepts could be applied to interactions between independent databases investigating how XML (or other types of) databases can be utilized as the basis of building dynamic pages in the semantic web
investigating the application of Resource Description Framework (RDF) to a particular application area
investigating the application of Web Ontology Language (OWL) to a particular application area