CS4624 Projects Discovery Portal

CS4624 is one of many capstone courses a student within the CS curriculum is able to take. The multimedia and hypertext course digs into the diverse range of multimedia content such as images, audio, video, and any information retrieval and access relating to it. With this comes the capstone project which is a semester long project given to us students to allow a display of mastery within our discipline. It has been a pleasure to have Dr. Farag and Vedant Shah guide and assist us with the project. An insight into real-world applications as well as a diverse approach to different problems has allowed us to grow as both people and developers. The current discovery portal for CS4624 student projects serves as a platform for students working within the course to submit and hold their projects. Details included within the pages on the discovery portal consist of abstract, date, author, presentation, final report, source code, and collections. Additionally, the discovery portal contains filtering features to allow users to specifically search for any project dependent on; recent, issue date, author, title, subject, content type, and department. This allows teachers to easily access desired projects as well as a safe holding for semester long projects that students worked hard on. With this comes the purpose of the project. After reviewing the functionality and appearance of the discovery portal, there were many things that needed to be improved on. The first very noticeable issue was that the search features did not either function properly or at all. For starters, the ‘By Issue Date’ filter would not allow filtering with either month or year. It was required that both were specified along with the open search requiring an exact formatting of date (xx-xx-xxxx). The ‘By Author’ filter expected that the full name was typed out, including the comma separating the first and last name. All open search features expected a prompt that would produce an exact match. It also came to our attention that some features produced over a thousand categories for only 269 projects. This should never be the case as the purpose of filtering is to narrow the search for projects. After analyzing the discovery portal, our main focus became improving upon the search and filtering features. This was something that would require us to completely recreate the discovery portal due to existing source code being unavailable. With this, we first needed to create a front-end and back-end that would relay any information requests to have a web page display. To replicate the discovery portal further, we also implemented an authentication aspect. Accounts would be divided into ‘admin’, ‘professor’, and ‘user’, each having distinct permissions on what they are able to insert, delete, and modify. Following this was the development of our database to store all of the projects’ files as well as a schema that the search and filtering features would utilize. Finally, we implemented a search api for the back-end to access, a completed schema for each project, and created a function search and filter function. Upon completion, we hope to provide future CS4624 students and staff with a more convenient tool to guide them in their journey of completing their capstone projects.