CS 378 Assignment 5

CS 378: Information Systems

Spring 1999

Assignment 5 (25 points)

Group Database Project

Proposal is Due Thursday April 1 (5 points)

Final Project is Due Thursday April 22 (20 points)

For this assignment, you will work as a group to design and implement a complete database system. Starting with a problem of your choice, your group will create a data model, refine its schema, physically implement the tables, and build Java interfaces so that users can easily interact with it.

The Proposal

For the first week, your group needs to decide on a project. Its nature is up to your group provided that the information is rich enough to give your group a worthwhile experience in the project's development. Your system's information may come from a number of sources:

Files downloaded from the internet (e.g. where the movie information came from)
Local information, typed or scanned (e.g. courses, student groups, local restaurants)
Fictional information (e.g. some adventure games have a database at the back end)
User-provided information (e.g. a rating or polling system)

Your proposal should provide a tentative entity-relationship diagram of the information your system will maintain and describe the services (e.g. queries and reports) it will provide to its users. In addition to the diagram, the proposal only needs to be a couple of paragraphs, possibly including a list.

Shortly after turning in your proposal, your group will receive feedback indicating whether your proposal is appropriately ambitious. You may also receive some additional guidance in how to proceed.

The Project

Obviously, the project's goals and requirements will vary from group to group. However, all projects will be graded using the following criteria:

Project sophistication
Quality of the database (e.g. well-formed schemas)
Implementation efficiency (e.g. good use of indexes)
Usability
Correctness
Quality of the code documentation

Your group will receive some feedback for the first criterion after submitting your design document. You will receive proposal and project scores as a group. However, individuals may receive additional credit for an outstanding contribution. In the hopefully rare event that an individual contributed little to the group's effort, he or she will receive little or no credit for the project.

In order to provide user-friendly services and to create reports, your system should make use of Java and its JDBC package, which we will cover in class. Ideally your project will make use of Java's graphical components. However, because our class will give them limited coverage, your group is not required to use them. In any case, you should feel free to ask for help in creating graphical interfaces using Java.

Final Submission

Your group should turn in hardcopies of the following:

An updated entity-relationship diagram
Schema listings
All source code
A short report describing the individual contributions.

Finally, during the last week of class, your group will give a short presentation demonstrating what your system does.

Group Assignments

Steve Hildebrand
Ryan McGirr
Scott Moran

Dan Bevis
Duncan Bolinger
Jon Patrono

Dan Kurtz
Erika Rupert
Demetri Tyler

Ray Brown
Ryan Doherty
Wes Murry

Mike Onofrio
Stephanie Porter
Jason Herr

Nikki Edmund
Joe Rodgers
Jason Mariano