Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Description:

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is emerging as a standard for describing and interchanging data among various systems and databases on the Internet. XML offers the Document Type Definition (DTD) as formalism for defining the syntax and structure of XML documents. The widespread adoption of XML is creating a new set of data management requirements, such as the need to store and query XML documents. XML data will be exchanged between increasing number of applications running on diverse devices and hence it is important to store and transport XML data efficiently. Wireless devices such as pagers, palm pilots, and cell phones are quite weak in terms of processing power. Hence, markup language such as Wireless Markup Language (WML) have been developed which are geared to the requirement of these devices. WML, however, is for the transmission of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) friendly web documents. The goal of our research is to develop a markup language suitable for playing distributed games on wireless devices. In this project, we will develop a scavenger hunt game played on wireless devices that uses a stripped down XML language that we create to communicate with a centralized Oracle Database. Various properties of our language and game set-up will be tested for efficiency and playability. In this project, we have some number of wireless users on one hand and an Oracle database on the other. Wireless users will be able to make requests of the Oracle database in order to get clues for a video game they are playing. Multiple players can make requests of the database at the same time, as it is distributed system. The Oracle database will nevertheless keep track of all the players' requests. The request and retrieval of data will be done using the XML features of Oracle databases.

Schedule:

Deliverables:

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

1. Come up with an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) DTD (Document Type Definition) to describe the state of a tic-tac-toe board. Write a JAVA program that reads in a file in XML language and draws tic-tac-toe board to screen.

2. Create a language to represent a play on a tic-tac-toe board and write a program that connects to an Oracle database using its XML features to play a tic-tac-toe using this language.

3. Write a Palm Pilot program that takes a person's first name, last name, and phone number and stores it in a Palm Database. This program should allow a person to see list of all names currently stored in the database.

4. Write a Palm Pilot program that can beam or receive records used in deliverable (3).

5. First semester report on project of length between 15-20 pages.

References:

[EN00] Elmasri, R. A., & Navathe, S. B. (2000). Fundamentals of Database Systems(3rd ed.). Addison-Wesley.

[F00] Foster, L.R. (2000). Palm OS Programming Bible. Hungry Minds, Inc.

[HM02] Harold, R. E., & Means, S.W. (2002). XML in a Nutshell (2nd ed.). O'Reilly.

[KBGP01] Kaljuvee, O., Buyukkokten, O., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A.(2001,April). Efficient Web Form Entry on PDAs.Proceedings of the tenth international conference on World Wide Web,663-672.

[LLF98] Leventhal, M., Lewis, D., & Fuchs, M. (1998). Designing XML Internet applications. PrenticeHall.

[RG02] Ramakrishnan, R., & Gehrke, J. (2002). Database Management Systems (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

[SM01] Sundaresan, N., Moussa, R. (2001,May). Algorithms and Programming Models for Efficient Representation of XML for Internet Applications. Proceedings of the tenth international conference on World Wide Web, 366-375.

[S01] Suciu, D. (2001,September). On Database Theory and XML.SIGMOD Record (8), 39-45.

[TVBSSZ02] Tatarinov, I., Viglas, D.S., Beyer, K., Shanmugasundaram, J., Shekita, E., Zhang, C. (2002,June). Storing and Querying Ordered XML using a Relational Database System. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, 204-215.