Assignment 1: Research Report Proposal

Assignments one and six of this course are closely related. The 6th assignment involves writing a research report (more specifically, a literature review) on a topic related to web data management. To help you start, this first assignment is meant to develop a proposal before you write the research report itself.

This means that for the first assignment you choose a research topic (a non-exhaustive list of possible topics is given at the bottom of this page) and do some preliminary investigation of the topic. In Assignment 6 you then write the actual research report on the topic selected in Assignment 1.

Your Research Proposal is a PDF document of at most three pages in which you indicate:

• your choice of topic
• a brief description of the topic and how it relates to data management and/or web technologies
• at least 3 sub-topics or questions that you may address in your actual Research report (see Assignment 6)
• your appraisal of how important this topic is for
• (a) fundamental (theoretical) research
• (b) general applied computer science
• (c) cutting edge IT industry
• (d) general computing industry
• (e) computer users in general
• a list of initial ‘secondary’ sources: books, encyclopedias,monographs, and (perhaps web-based) review articles, plus a very brief (one or two sentences for each source) description of why you think the source may be useful in your Research report
• a list of at least 3 ‘primary’ sources (published research papers presented at conferences or articles in scientific journals) plus a very brief (one or two sentences per source) description of why you think the source maybe useful in your Research report.

For both Assignment 1 and 6, you are required to submit a single PDF file by the due date. For Assignment 1, it is suggested that you use LaTeX to produce the PDF; for Assignment 6, it is requiredthat you use LaTeX. The software is freely available for both Windows and Linux.

Here is a LaTeX template for Assignment 1; here is a LaTeX template for Assignment 6; and here is aexample BibTex references file for use with paper_template.tex.

Listen to the digital audio recordings of the first two lectures to hear more information about these assignments. Please note that some information in older recordings may be out of date.

Examples of Research Proposals (Assignment 1)

Here is one example of a Research Proposal. For privacy reasons I am not able to give the mark that this submission received, but it was generally good.

• How the use of Asnychronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) impacts web information systems by Dennis Winckler.

Examples of Research Reports (Assignment 6)

Here are 4 examples of Research Reports submitted by students of this course in the past. For privacy reasons I am not able to give the marks that these submissions received. Suffice it to say that the examples here were generally very good, with room for improvements in several areas.

• Developing Web Applications using OOHDM and RoR by Lasse Motroen.
• XML and Security: XML Encryption by Leow Yuon Chow.
• Web Services: Security by David Sale.
• Web Services: SOAP vs. REST by (name withheld by request).

Note that you may treat these examples as any other (in this case formally unpublished) resource: you may cite the paper as a Technical Report. The BibTex entry would look like this:

@TECHREPORT{LM06,

author = "Lasse Motroen",
title = "Developing Web Applications using OOHDM and RoR",
institution = "University of Southern Queensland",
month = "November",
year = "2006",
note = "CSC8417 Assignment 3, examined by Dr S. Dekeyser",

}

Research Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics for your research report. This list may grow during the first few weeks of the semester.
Remember that you may also suggest a topicyourself. However, it must be accepted by the examiner/lecturer of the course, and cover a research issue on which several academic (or, to a lesser extent, industry) articles or papers have been written. The topic must be relevant to Data Management and/or Web Technology.

1. Transactions and concurrency control for XML databases
2. Support for Web Database/Information Systems Transactions
3. Integrating Web and DBMS
4. Query optimization in relational databases
5. Query optimization for XPath and/or XQuery
6. Indexing XML
7. Security and XML, XML Signature
8. Security and XML, XML Encryption
9. Efficient XML Interchange, binary XML
10. Resource Description Framework (RDF)
11. From XML Schema to RDF, RDF Schema
12. Query Languages for RDF, SPARQL
13. Web Ontology Language (OWL)
14. The Semantic Web, Overview of Research
15. Semantic Web: Applications for Health Care and Life Sciences
16. Web Services: SOAP/WSDL vs REST
17. Web Services: modelling, management, specification
18. Web Services: transaction support
19. Web Services: Publication and Searching
20. Web Services: scheduling, execution
21. Web Services: Reliability, Trustiness, Security
22. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)
23. XForms vs MS InfoPath
24. Web-based Information Retrieval (models, indexing, searching, ...)
25. OLAP support in commercial/open-source RDBMSs
26. Data Mining: "a priori" algorithms and implementations
27. Data Mining: developments since "a priori"
28. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
29. AJAX vs others (XUL, XAML, SVG, Adobe Flex, ...)
30. SVG vs Flash
31. eGovernment: Electronic Forms, Data Exchange
32. Streaming XML: querying and related issues
33. Big Data (many possible topics)
34. Non-relational database systems (e.g. Hadoop etc)
35. Data Visualisation on the Web (e.g. D3.js, C3.js etc)

Resources

• Finding Information Tutorials (USQ Library)
• What is referencing? (USQ Library)
• Google Scholar
• The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
• DBLP: Computer Science Bibliography