Web Information Systems

TU Delft students can of course find all information on education in Blackboard.

IN4324: Web & Semantic Web Engineering, 5ec, teacher: Geert-Jan Houben, period: 1+2

The course explains the concept of web-based information system and thus concentrates on a large class of modern information systems that use the Web in one way or another.

• The course considers methods and techniques for the design and development of web-based information systems, and as a consequence it gives an insight into the state of the art of the research area of Web Engineering.
• A main development in the field is known as Semantic Web, and its main concepts and languages are presented, both in terms of theory and of applications and tools. This includes attention for RDF, RDFS, OWL, and associated query languages. The course presents state-of-the-art applications based on these concepts and languages.
• A major trend in Web-based systems concerns the demand to know and understand the users and their usage of the system, for example to be able to adapt and personalize their web experience. Modeling and analyzing the users is therefore a major area of research and the course introduces approaches for user modeling and adaptation.
• Social Web is having a big impact on the web, for example through user-generated content and as source for user modeling and analysis, e.g. Twitter-based user profiling.
• While the area of engineering web-based systems is strongly driven by technology and innovation, the emerging attention for Web Science is addressed and the main work in that field is discussed.

IN4325: Information Retrieval, 5ec, teacher: Alessandro Bozzon, period: 3

Retrieving relevant information is one of the central activities in modern knowledge societies. As the amount and variety of data increase at an unprecedented rate, access to relevant, possibly unstructured information is becoming more and more challenging. Information Retrieval (IR) is the discipline that deals with the representation, storage, organisation of, and access to information items, and it is concerned with providing efficient access to large amounts of unstructured contents, such as text, images, videos etc. 

The IN4325 course will provide and introduction to the main Information Retrieval problems and most common solutions. Covered topics include:

• Basic IR Models (boolean, vector-based, probabilistic)
• Term Weighting and Scoring
• Basic Indexing Techniques
• Web Search
• Relevance Feedback and Query Expansion
• Semantic Search
• Information Seeking Paradigms
• Multimedia and social search
• Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems
• Crowdsourcing
• Human Computation
• Games With a Purpose

IN4326: Seminar Web Information Systems, 5ec, teacher: Geert-Jan Houben, period: 1

In this seminar we discuss recent developments in the area of web information systems. The topics are chosen in the first session of each edition.
In the seminar the students will have to prepare and give lectures on the basis of research papers about the selected topics. They will also have to attend the presentations and participate in discussions on the presentations. In addition students will have to write a short survey about a topic in the area of web information systems. The goal is to

• to expose the student to current developments in research on web information systems;
• to familiarize the student with reading, presenting and discussing scientific papers;
• to help the student in reading and writing scientific papers and choosing a topic for her/his thesis.

IN4331: Web Data Management, 5ec, teacher: Jan Hidders, period: 4

This course covers advanced XML, JSON and related web-technologies from a data management perspective. Part 1 of the course will cover the basics, including XML itself, DTDs, XPath, XSLT, and Web services. In Part 2 we will turn our attention to XML databases and XQuery, the XML query language from the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) which lies at the heart of most XML data management approaches and technologies. In Part 3 we will focus on web-scale data-management and discuss distributed file systems and distributed indexing, distributed noSQL databases such as CouchDB, distributed computing platforms such as MapReduce and languages to program them such as Pig Latin. If time permits also RDF storage will be discussed.

TI1500: Web- en Databasetechnologie, 4ec, teacher: Jan Hidders, period 2. First year course in TI.

This course covers the basic technologies of the World Wide Web  such as HTML, CSS and HTTP. In addition more advanced technologies for dynamic interactive web sites such as JavaScript, DOM, AJAX and PHP. Next to this relational database technology is introduced as it forms the foundation of many web applications. The storage, retrieval en transformation of data by SQL-queries across the Internet is studied as a means to support web applications. After this the ways in which data can be organized and modeled in a relational database is discussed, and the correct usage of higher-level data-models such as the Entity-Relationship data model is discussed.

TI2500: Informatie- en Datamodellering, 4ec, teacher: Jan Hidders, period 3. Second year course in TI.

This course covers correctly modeling and efficiently managing large and critical amounts of data in Database Management Systems (DBMSs). The following topics are covered:

• Normalization: Modeling correctly and efficiently data in the relational model, to avoid redundancy, ambiguities and inconsistencies.
• Disk organization and indexing: The main data structures and the associated algorithms to store, transform and retrieve data from disk-based storage are treated.
• Query processing and optimization: The techniques used by DBMSs for the efficient execution of queries are discussed. This includes taking into account the way that the data is stored and available indexes.
• Transaction management and concurrency control: The techniques a DBMS uses to manage and control concurrent access to large data sets by many different users and applications such that conflicts and inconsistencies are avoided.
• Recovery: The reliability of (R)DBMSs rests on their ability to recover correctly after a disk or computer crash. The available techniques for this, including the required additional actions during normal operation, will be discussed.

Big Data Processing, 5ec, teacher: Claudia Hauff. Second year course in TI. 

This course will be offered new in Autumn 2013.

The group is also involved in the coordination of the Information Architecture (IA) track in the Computer Science master. Jan Hidders is its master coordinator and first contact for CS-IA students.