CS 502
Architecture of Web Information Systems
Spring 2003

Logistics

Basic Information

Assumed Background

Students are expected to have Java programming expertise and knowledge of computer systems, data structures, and algorithms commensurate with completion of CS211.  

Course Structure

The course consists of:
    2 lectures per week
    1 discussion section per week
 

Student commitment consists of:
    Completing the assigned readings (demonstrated by section participation)
    Reaction papers
    2 programming projects

Readings and Reaction Papers

The subject of the course is a dynamic area.  Most of the material in the course is the result of research and implementation over the past 3-5 years.  Fortunately almost all of this work is available through papers on the open-source Web.  Readings are assigned for each week's discussion section as listed in the syllabus.

Students are expected to approach each week's readings critically.  Are the ideas sound?  What are the alternatives and trade-offs?   How well do the ideas fit into the larger information context?  What are the barriers to success: technical, social, legal, and economic. Weekly sections are meant to be a forum for discussing these critical reactions, driven by student participation and NOT by instructor or teaching assistant presentations.  The amount of section participation and the degree to which it represents critical evaluation of the readings is an important criteria of grading, as detailed below.

Reaction papers, which are due every three weeks, are another vehicle for critically evaluating readings.  The reaction paper assignments are structured as follows: you should cover at least two closely related papers relevant to the current section of the course.  One of the papers should be from the course syllabus (assigned for either the current discussion section or the ones immediately preceding).  Another should be a related paper that you discover via another method such as references in the papers you have read, searching on Google, ResearchIndex, CiteSeer, or the like, or via the library gateway.  Think of finding this paper as a mini resource discovery exercise.  You should then write approximately 2-3 pages in which you address the following points:

Reaction papers should not just be summaries of the papers you read; most of your text should be focused on synthesis of the underlying ideas, and your own perspective on the papers. Reaction papers should be done individually (i.e. not in groups). 

Submission procedure for reaction papers is as follows:

Books

All required readings are available on the Web.  However, the project assignments require use of XML and related tools, for which you might find some books useful.  I have requested that the bookstore stock "Essential XML Quick Reference: A Programmer's Reference to XML, XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, SOAP, and More", which is an excellent reference for all tools required.  Two other excellent books that you might find useful, and which are available from amazon.com are:

Tools

Working with XML, XSLT, and the like is considerably easier if you don't have to worry about syntactic details.  Fortunately, there are a number of excellent tools available to avoid this.  Two that I recommend are xmlspy and Stylus Studio.  I will be using the latter throughout the course.  You may download it onto your personal machine for a 30-day free trial, which may be renewed.  Both tools are Windows-only (sorry Mac users). 

Project Assignments

Work in the area of web information systems requires the ability to understand and use protocols and work with a number of XML-related tools.  The course projects provide you with the opportunity to gain expertise in these areas.  Students will work in groups of three and grading will be uniform within each group.  Project details will be provided in the second to third week of the semester.

Assignments and Grading

Final course grades will be based on project assignments, participation in sections, and reaction papers.  As stated above grades on project assignments will be uniform within each group.  The latter two grading criteria are based on individual performance.   The weightings given to these components are as follows:

Students will receive mid-point participation grades halfway through the semester, giving an opportunity for improvement in this area.

Feedback Responsibility

Like any Cornell course, the goal of CS502 is to provide the context for students to learn about a subject area that the instructor finds relevant and interesting. Students should expect that the course meets their expectations, is stimulating, and worthy of their time.  I hope to convince many of you that you might want to engage in future work in this area.  It is your responsibility for telling me if the course fails to meet these expectations - your feedback is necessary to making this semester successful.  

Email and Newsgroup  

A course mail list has been set up at CS502-SPR2003-L@cornell.edu.  Students should subscribe to this list and monitor messages and announcements sent on it.  It is the primary vehicle that I will use for keeping the entire class up-to-date.  Instructions for using mail lists are at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/email/using-lists/. I have left this list open for posting from students for sharing of questions and ideas.  Please confine list postings to matters relevant to the entire class and help keep the traffic down to what is necessary.  

There is also a newsgroup for the course on the cit news server (newsstand.cit.cornell.edu).  The group is cornell.class.cs502.  Students are free to use this group for appropriate class communications.  Neither the instructor or TAs will be monitoring or maintaining this group.

IMPORTANT: email for the instructor or TAs should be sent to their personal email addresses (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu, dmitriev@cs.cornell.edu, awb13@cornell.edu, sv69@cornell.edu) and must include the token "CS502" (e.g. "CS502 I need some help") at the beginning of the subject line to ensure prompt attention. Mail without this prefix in the subject line may end up being lost in ever growing email queues.

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Carl Lagoze (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu) 
Last changed: 02/26/2003