Alternative project 2 - Bibliography information management system

Students can choose this project as an alternative to creating their own. The deliverables are as specified in the instructions below and are expected to be implemented should a student choose this alternative project. This alternative project is obligation free, meaning that students do not have to do this and can choose or design their own project.

In this alternative project, students are required to develop a database management information system using Java to manage and visualize bibliographical information.

• Develop a system using Java to manage the bibliography information collected by yourself using DBLP bibliography database
• The system can manage the bibliography information and visualise the relationships among authors involved in co-authoring the papers

1. Data collection

You need to collect bibliography information yourself using DBLP bibliography database. Please go to DBLP bibliography for collecting data (published papers). DBLP is the most widely used bibliography database in the area of database and related areas. You need to import your selected publications into your own database for this system.

In DBLP, you can find the list of publications, arranged in chronological order with the latest publications listed first, for given authors. For example, DBLP entries can be found at. Please note that there may be multiple authors by the same name whose publications are listed together. You, however, do not need to consider this issue in this project.

In order to ensure the necessary scale of data used for this project, we require that the number of the publications that you collect for this project must exceed 50 and the number of authors involved should not be less than 10.

• Collect bibliography information using DBLP bibliography database.  
• DBLP is the most widely used bibliography database in the area of database and related areas.
• Import the selected publications into your own database for this system.
• It is required that the number of the publications that you collect for this project must exceed 50 and the number of authors involved should not be less than 10.

2. Major system functions

2.1 Basic statistical function

The system can present some basic statistical information including, for example, the number of papers, the number of (distinctive) authors, the number of journals/conferences papers stored in your database. The system should also provide similar statistical information for each author.

2.2 Search function

Users can search for any particular entries based on various key information such as author name, keywords appearing in the paper title, publication venues and year, etc.

2.3 Update function

The system should allow insertions and deletions of bibliography entries into or from the database.

2.4 Visualization function

The system should feature a visualizer to demonstrate the relationship different authors in the database and use appropriate shapes with different sizes to indicate the different number of publications of authors.

Links are used in the visualizer to indicate the relationships among authors. You may choose different ways to indicate the importance of collaboration among authors such as using different stroke thickness for the links between them.  The strength of collaboration relationship between a pair of authors, a1 and a2, during a particular time period t can be quantified using either the metric called Naïve Linkage Score (NLS) or Advanced Linkage Score (ALS), both of which are defined as follows:    

NLS(a1,a2) =# of co-authored papers by a1 and a2 in t

ALS(a1, a2) = Σf(a1,a2) for all co-authored papers by a1 and a2

where f(a1, a2) is defined as:

• f(a1, a2)=1 if botha1 and a2 are among the first three authors of the paper;
• f(a1, a2)=1/2 if one of the two authors is among the first three authors of the paper and the other one isn`t;
• f(a1, a2)=1/4 if none of the two authors is among the first three authors of the paper.

Apparently, ALS is more advanced than NLS by considering additionally the positions of the authors in the author list. It is noted that the value of NLS and ALS between a given pair of authors may be different for different time period t.

• The visualizer should be able to display the author relationship graph under bothNLS and ALS.
• The visualizer can show the relationships among authors based on conference publications or journal publications or both.
• The visualizer should be able to demonstrate relationships among authors for any particular year (e.g., in 2016) and a range of years (from 2010 to 2016). It is preferable to use scroll bar to simulate the timeline and by sliding through on it we can specify the year or the range of years. Besides utilizing the graphical presentation to display relationships among authors, the system can at the same time present in a tabular form the top k closest co-authors for a given author under the time condition specified. The value of k is specified by users.
• Any other useful/interesting functions for the visualizer are welcome and additional bonus will be considered.

Bonus Questions

• Determine if you can come up with some better metric to quantify the strength of relationship among authors. Please provide your justification and visualization result comparison to support your claim. You can get up to 10% bonus points additionally for providing a good answer to this bonus question.

Other system components

• Graphical User Interface (GUI). The system needs to have a graphical interface developed solely using Java for facilitating human users to interact with the system. The interface is supposed to be user-friendly and encompass the functionalities to be delivered.
• The system will need to use a database to store the bibliography information. The connection of the application program and the back-end database needs to be established using Java.