ISLT 9412: Information Storage and Retrieval with Dr. Thomas Kochtanek
This is a description of an upcoming course for the Spring 2010 semester. The syllabus is undergoing revision. If you have any questions about this course, please feel free to contact me.
Beginning the fourth week of class, students will engage in a 12 week lab where they will learn the theory and fundamentals of relational database design. They will practice at building a database composed of multiple tables, normalized to the third form, that will contain records of a small collection in their reach (e.g., books, movies, music CDs, LPs, Web resources - text or images, etc.) as the source of data. The collection used by the students will be described and added to the database using unqualified Dublin Core. Once the database is constructed, students will learn some of the basic notions and problems of IR, such as precision, recall, boolean queries, and the like, and how these relate to some of the basic practices in the organization of information. Experience with these tools is not a prerequisite, the purpose is not to become a database administrator, but the material will require some patience and an adventurous spirit.