1. CS561- Advanced topics in database systems
CS561-Spring 2012
WPI, Mohamed eltabakh
Suggested Projects

2. Project
Teams of 2 (or 3)
Several candidate projects to select from (or come up with new ideas)
Platform to work on:
PostgreSQL, or
Hadoop
Work closely with instructor for continues feedback and directions
Study and comparison between different techniques or exploring new ideas

3. project i: Conflict Management in Scientific Databases
In scientific applications, e.g., in biology, chemistry, or physics
Many groups and labs are working on the objects
They may have conflicting data
No single correct version of the data
Currently detecting, resolving, and managing these conflicts is done manually
Very expensive manual effort, consuming manpower, not accurate
Goal: Automate the conflict management process in database systems
Challenges:
Mechanisms to specify the comparable objects, e.g., what tuples??
What field(s) to compare against each other, how to compare (which function), how to measure the degree of conflict
Ontology for the comparison
Which conflicting data should be resolved first
Frequently queried objects, priority mechanism, etc.

4. project Ii: Keyword Search over Annotations
Annotations are extra data attached to the database items (table cells, rows, columns, etc.)
They represent comments, feedback, provenance information
Annotation management is a new hot topic in database systems
How to annotate the data
How to efficiently store and index the annotations
How to query the annotations
B1: Curated by user admin
B5: This gene has an unknown function
B4: pseudogene
GID
GName
GSequence
JW0080
mraW
ATGATGGAAAA…
JW0041
fixB
ATGAACACGTT…
JW0037
caiB
ATGGATCATCT…
JW0055
yabP
ATGAAAGTATC…
B3: obtained from GenoBase
B2: possibly split by frameshift
Gene

5. project Ii: Keyword Search over Annotations
Goal: Applying keyword searching on annotations has no been addressed yet
Challenges:
Indexing annotations for keyword searching
Interrelated annotations
Querying annotations and the base data ….

6. project IiI: Annotation Management in the Presence of Materialized Views
Materialized views basically copy transformed pieces of data (mostly for performance issues)
Incremental maintenance of MVs is a rich research area
If the base data are annotated, what should we do with the annotations???
Goal: Supporting annotations in the presence of MVs
Challenges:
Should the MV carry the annotations? If so, how to incrementally maintain the annotations up-to-date?
Should the MV not carry the annotations? If so, then at query time, how to find the annotations efficiently?
If the MV is annotated, how to automatically propagate the annotations back to the base tables??

7. project IV: Similarity-Based Processing in Hadoop
Hadoop infrastructure assumes exact matching for joins, and aggregations
Between Map and Reduce phases
In many applications, similarity-based processing is essential, e.g., joins and aggregations based on similarity not exact match
Recent two or three papers about similarity-based processing in Hadoop
Goal: study these recent work and compare between the different techniques. Hopefully new ideas will arise

8. Any other ideas
By next Thursday (Jan. 26) groups should be formed and the project is selected