Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett (cpollett@yahoo.com)

Abstract:

The main goal of this project is to produce a framework that contains some templates of sample office forms and can identify the forms associated with any person in a database. A person working on a new form can choose from the existing templates and customize it as required. A database of forms and the details of the people associated with it will be maintained. If a new form is requested of a person for which data has already been successfully gathered by another, then our system will be clever enough to modify the current form so that when it is printed it only requests a fixed ID together with the data that has not been previously requested. We intend our set-up to be flexible enough so that if two departments of a company do mass mailings to request data of the same individual. Then the data requested will be still be individualized to a given person. Data can also collected by either paper or web-based forms in a seemless manner. The framework that we will develop in this project will communicate with a database using an XML format with respect to an XML schema for that specifies what the data looks like. Forms will be created and stored using the new XML Forms language.

Schedule:

Deliverables:

The full project will be done when CS298 is completed. The following will be done by the end of CS297:

1. Do a research on usability of forms. Read up on XML Forms and produce an example document.

2. Write a GUI program that has some sample template forms and allows you to create new forms

3. Write an XML Schema to describe the data associated with the forms

4. Match the forms to the people associated with them.

5. CS 297 Report.

References:

[HM02] Harold,R.E.,&, S.W. XML in a Nutshell (2nd ed.). O'Reilly. 2003.