Web Application Development

Requirements

The most important requirements are:

• The project consists of a (micro-)service-based Web application (i.e., a software system) developed by using existing social and semantic Web technologies.

• A project proposal could be chosen by maximum 3 teams. Each team can have 2—3 members.

• There are no restrictions regarding the project implementation: hardware and/or software platform(s), programming language(s)/paradigm(s), framework(s), libraries, public APIs, etc.

• Open source approaches are highly encouraged.

• For the final assessment, the team must provide the full functionality of the developed solution, according to the specific requirements stated in the project description and discussed in the first 7 weeks of the semester during practical works (WADe labs).

• The project should be developed and deployed according to the actual practices in Web engineering (e.g., documentation, test driven development, modularity, bug reporting, etc.) by using a modern approach regarding source-code management like Bitbucket, GitHub, or similar cloud-based solutions.

• All data managed by the developed Web application must be described in RDF – based on existing knowledge models (vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies,...). Various interrogations should be performed by using the SPARQL query language.

• Resource representations to be processed by the (Web/mobile) client will include a valid HTML5 code, plus schema.org and RDFa constructs.

• Each thing (resource) of interest will be exposed (and shared) by using a generated URL and/or QR code.

• The code-source and specific content (data) must be available under the terms of the open source licenses and Creative Commons – consult Software Licenses in Plain English and Social Coding and Open Software.

Additional factors taken into consideration for the project evaluation:

• A proper use of various "exotic" programming paradigms like functional, distributed, parallel, reactive, etc.

• Adopting a cloud-based solution – i.e. for the (RDF) data storage and/or the Web application deployment.

• Using specific design patterns regarding the Web application architecture and/or the knowledge modeling – for example, applying various ontology design patterns.

• Creativity and social impact of the proposed solution.

• Team work – a penalty of 2 points for each assessed component will be applied for a 1-person project effort. Each member of the team will specify the most important contributions to the developed solution.

• Implementation maturity – study Software Quality Checklist and Web Developer Checklist.

• Overall impression – e.g., the suitable use of discussed Web technologies, impact on the end users + usability, business aspects, performance, further directions of development – consider things users care about.

We also encourage positive critics and questions from students.

Deliverables & calendar

Each student team must deliver the following resources, according to each project proposal. All deliverables are mandatory.

Midterm Deliverables—Design & Architecture: A (10%) – Week #9

• A general (service-oriented) architecture of the Web application to be developed + the overall design from the point of view of a software engineer (for example: main modules, UML diagrams, input/output data formats, data/task flows, etc.) and final users.

• An OpenAPI specification regarding the REST API – or, alternatively, a schema for the GraphQL API – provided by the project, including various usage examples and pragmatic case studies.

• A Scholarly HTML technical report (its digital content will be equivalent to a minimum of four A4 printed pages) consisting of preliminary considerations about the internal data structures/models to be used and the external data sources – e.g., public Web services and/or APIs – managed by the Web application to be developed. Also, explain how the solution conforms to the linked data principles.

• A public blog, wiki and/or personal Web site recording the project progress. The content should be available in English language and minimally tagged with project, infoiasi, wade, and web.

Final Deliverables—Solution: S (70%) – Week #17

• A fully implemented and deployed – e.g. in the cloud – solution of the software project.

• An updated Scholarly HTML technical report (equivalent to minimum 10 printed A4 pages) describing the most significant details about:

  • project progress with respect to the initial goals, requirements, and projected outcome;

  • technical aspects concerning the implemented API(s) according to the proposed Web system architecture;

  • considerations regarding the designed/reused RDF-based knowledge model(s) – for example, the expressiveness and real usage of the proposed and/or reused vocabulary, taxonomy or ontology in the context of the developed system;

  • pragmatic use of external data/knowledge sources – e.g., using various knowledge bases like Wikidata and DBpedia, plus several non-trivial SPARQL queries of interest;

  • A user guide of the developed solution – also available as a Scholarly HTML document including screen-captures and explaining at least 3 case-studies –, plus a (U)HD-quality video demonstration (duration: 5—7 minutes).

  • These resources will be available on the same public blog, wiki and/or personal Web site presented at the midterm assessment.

💎 Bonuses

Each team could be awarded with an amount of maximum 3 points for:

• adopting SHACL to validate RDF data,

• using various deep/machine learning techniques,

• discussing and adopting methods and/or paradigms regarding the user interaction/experience,

• specifying a set of proper statecharts – details of interest,

• considering significant aspects with respect to the interoperability, performance, and/or security of the implemented solution.

The presentation of the project has allocated maximum 20 minutes per team, including questions.

Project Reassessment

• Mandatory deliverables remain the same.

• Each failed component will be reevaluated with a 2 point penalty.