Background to the Project

This project was initally undertaken in 2003/2004 as a final year project by Pierce Gleeson. He designed the tool, as set out in the requirements, to be of help to post graduate students research. The tool has users, as set up by the admin of the site. These users can then, add, remove, edit and view entries to the site. Each entry has an associated BibTex entry also. When a user looks at an entry they feel may be of help to another userm they can set up a flag to that user, recommending the paper to them. When that user logs in next, the flag will appear, along with whatever comment was left.

Who's Who?

• Student: Suzanne Corbett 4th CSSE
• Supervisors: Tom Naughton and Andrew Page

So how did it go?

The project is now completed and has been submitted for assessment. Four of the five requirements were implemented. The new version of the tool now has:

• A completely redesigned and rebuilt database
• A BibTeX parser, which allows users to enter a single, or multiple BibTeX entries to a text box, and the system then parsers that data and places the appropiate fields in the database.
• A search engine which provides users with the option to:
  • Perform a search which returns all entries in the database
  • Enter their own SQL queries to search the database
  • Enter keywords they with to search for. They also have the further option of returning entries which match all, or any of the words they have entered.
• A recommender system which recommends papers to users based on the papers they themselves have added to the tool

Time Delay!!!

Unfortunately, due to my computer being compromised by an external hacked, my system was down from Monday morning, November 22nd until Friday morning, November 26th. The entire system had to be wiped. I have a back up of my home directory and the /etc directory of the operating system. All applications will now have to be re-installed from scratch but hopefully this will not take nearly as long as it did initially. During the time that the computer was down, I concentrated on other aspects of the project. I spend a considerable amount of time carrying out some literature review. I also made a start on the installation manual. This is not listed as a requirement until the very end, but I am hoping getting some of it completed now will allow for more development time at the end.