Student Project Ideas

General Topic Areas

I am primarily interested in supervising projects relating to any of the following:

server-side web technologies,
Perl/CGI, PHP or Python
relational databases,
relational methods (eg. relation algebra)
ontologies,
visualisation,
scalable vector graphics (SVG),
natural language processing,
information architecture,
semiotics.

I would be interested in discussing any project ideas related to any of these topic areas. The topics below are just an indication of what a more specific project description could look like. I have more ideas - but would rather discuss them by email or in person. Please, contact me by email if you are interested.

A Java applet for graph visualisation tools

A variety of graph visualisation tools currently exist (for example, Touchgraph or Graphviz) which automatically provide powerful graph layout algorithms. The idea for this project is to write a Java applet that provides an interactive client interface for graphs that are created on a server (for example, sitemaps, UML diagrams, topic maps). This project wouldn't start from scratch because similar Java applications already exist. The idea would be to use this technology for novel applications.

Processing Chinese websites with server-side languages (Perl/PHP)

Chinese characters are non-ASCII characters which can be represented in a variety of encodings (Unicode and other). This means server-side technology (such as search engines) needs to be slightly adapted in order to cope with such character sets. On the other hand, the Unihan database which identifies every single character is freely available and serves as a basic dictionary (although at character level, not word-level). This provides interesting challenges and opportunities for Perl/PHP applications in the processing of Chinese websites. This project would start with a detailed overview of the current encodings and then focus on a particular aspect, for example, multi-lingual search engines or character translation services. (This project isn't just for Chinese students, but some basic knowledge of Chinese would be useful.)

Can a 17th Century Ontology be used for the Semantic Web?

In the 17th century Bishop Wilkins compiled an ontology which is somewhat similar to Roget's Thesaurus. The idea for this project is to convert Bishop Wilkins' ontology into either a relational database or OWL and then to use either Semantic Web technology (eg the Protege Software) or database technology to evaluate the ontology.

Visualisation of Lexical Databases

Large lexical databases, such as WordNet are full of implicit structures, which can only be explored if visualisation techniques are applied. There are already some existing tools, such as the visual thesaurus, but many more possibilities for projects. The idea for this project is NOT to create visualisation tools from scratch but instead to apply existing tools to existing databases (which is still a difficult task!).