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Below
are some topics for students interested in independent studies. If
interested contact Dr. George Karabatis, georgek AT umbc DOT edu to set
up an appointment and discuss further details.
Independent Study on Information
Integration
This independent study focuses on a very important problem in
private/public organizations, government, or anyplace that needs access
to data: How to integrate information stored in different databases.
Although the simple extraction of data from multiple databases followed
by simple union of the results has been used extensively in daily
database applications, it has been proven that this approach is
insufficient with today’s vast amounts of semantically
varying
data.
This Independent Study targets this exact research problem, and
students are expected to apply semantic techniques to databases to
provide semantically meaningful data integration with an emphasis on
semantic network techniques. The mode of the course will be dual: A
research problem with literature review, and a proposed implementation
solution.
Requirements: Students should be knowledgeable of, or willing to learn
advanced database concepts.
Application domains: Environmental databases, or Biological databases
depending on student preference.
Independent
Study on Data Quality
This Independent Study deals with a real problem that has been in
existence since the dawn of databases. The huge amount of data in
databases is going ‘stale’. The data is also
getting
‘dirty’ and queries to the databases do not bring
back
results consistent with reality. Many errors occur at different phases
of the lifecycle of data, resulting in ‘dirty’
data. This
independent study targets this problem. Specifically, the following
questions will be addressed:
Why data get dirty? What are the root causes? What is the percentage of
dirty data? How to create mechanisms to alleviate this problem? Now I
updated and corrected the dirty data. How to guarantee that it will
stay current?
The mode of the course will be dual: A research problem with literature
review and a proposed implementation solution.
Requirements: Students should be knowledgeable of advanced database
concepts.
Application domains: Environmental databases, or Biological databases
depending on student preference.
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