Project Information

Schedule

• January 29: 1-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 February 5: feedback on proposal returned to you
• February 28: 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 1-2 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 March 4: feedback on status report returned to you
• April 3-10: 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 April 3. Your presentation should be ~15 minutes long - with at least 3 minutes of that time reserved for questions and answers. 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, April 16 - 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 formatting (i.e., what the page length is - I do care about the structure of the document, though); 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.
• Helping users to create an ontology or schema is a well understood process. Explore the best methodologies for doing so, especially focusing on open source software.
• Open data
  Open data is an interesting challenge because there is substantial pressure to make the open data available, but not a huge amount of incentive to make it easy to use. One of the challenges that my group is working on is how to make open data easier to use. Here are some topics within that that may make good course projects:
  • The city of Surrey has a large catalog of open data. Look at the open data and propose/try to complete interesting projects that would combine the data from multiple sources. The idea would be that you would simultaneously do something with open data, which would be an interesting project in and of itself, but would also likely mean that you would run into problems, which would be good potential research directions.
  • Part of the challenge of working on open data is coming up with a dataset (or datasets) to use. Look at the literature on open data and come up with a repository of the open datasets that are used in the papers, including what characteristics the datasets have and what problems were looked into in the paper that cites them.
  • Conduct a related work search on Open Data Discovery. A good place to start is Renée J. Miller: Open Data Integration. Proc. VLDB Endow. 11(12): 2130-2139 (2018)
• End users often have different mental models of how their data is laid out than it actually is. As long as the data that they want is accessible through the applications that they are using, this is fine. However, when that is *not* the case, then it is hard for people to find what they need.

  A current research direction for me is to make it so that we can help users to write down their mental model and then map it to the actual data sources as automatically as possible. Then users can use data integration and data exchange techniques to query the representation of their mental model and get answers from the source(s) in which their data is stored.

  There are several directions that I am interested in going for this project:

  • Some students and colleagues in Civil Engineering and I have previously done a manual version of this by creating an ontology of building data corresponding to a class of users' mental models. We then manually mapped this to the Building Information Model standard Industry Foundation Classes XML Schema. This project was done ~10 years ago. Dig out the old pieces, see what's there, and if possible, see what needs to be updated.
  • Survey current work on how to help users with little database knowledge create mental models of their own work.
  • Survey current mapping algorithms (i.e., algorithms that help to create mappings between schemas)
• A digital twin is a version of a real world object that is represented digitially so that people can look at the digital representation and find things about it more easily than they can by investigating the real world object. For example, the digital twin of a building would allow users to keep track of the temperature in each room by looking at an application rather than by having to go to each room in the building.

  A group of civil engineering researchers and I are investigating what the various needs of users of digital twins are and how that aligns with existing digital twin technology. One project would be to investigate existing digital twin technology and see what is needed for the data management aspects.

• 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].

To make sure that you don't plagiarize, always add in citations where appropriate as you are working on your paper. Never cut and paste text and put it in your work without putting it quotations. Do not rely on the fact that you will come back later and change wording later.

I note that using ChatGPT or a similar system on any work that you turn in also constitutes plagiarism.

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: ICCS 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
Traditional, Ancestral & Unceded Musqueam Territory