Projects and Ideas : KoolKampus.com

An Academic Meta Search Engine

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:52:52 +0000

Many Universities and colleges provide facilites for searching their own WWW sites using a variety of different technologies and software packages. All these facilities have WWW interfaces. The project is to develop a meta search engine that will accept user requests, generate suitbaly formatted requests to the various engines, gather up the results and present them to the user in a consistent fashion

A Java Disassembler

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:51:45 +0000

A disassembler (or decompiler) is a piece of software which takes executable code and recovers, as far as possible, the original source. Exectuable Java code is normally in bytecode format. The project is to develop a tool (or tools) that will take Java bytecodes and present the program in a human readable form.

WWW Page administration

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:50:44 +0000

Web sites consisting of many hundreds (or thousands) of pages are now common. Such sites are often the work of teams of people. The project is to develop support software to aid in the construction and maintenance of such sites by providing facilities similar to those used to support large software projects. In particular there should be facilities for booking pages into and out of the public document set and ensuring, as far as possible, that pages conform to local standards.

Unicode

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:50:13 +0000

Unicode is an accepted international standard for 16-bit encoding of characters so providing support for an extensive range of character sets including Japanese and Chinese. Many modern software products claim to be Unicode capable in the anticipation of the wider use of Unicode. However currently there do not appear to be any significant Unicode text products available. The project is to investigate Unicode and the requirements of software to edit and print Unicode encoded text. A good student should be capable of developing such facilities.

Fractal Images

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:49:47 +0000

Fractal images provide an interesting way of storing an acceptable likeness of an image using a small amount of data. Compression much better than JPEG or GIF is usually achieved. Unfortunately the compression technology is proprietary however decompression appears not to be. The widespread use of this form of image storage and transmission could drastically reduce the communications overheads associated with the World Wide Web.

The project involves investigation of fractal image techniques with a view to developing a fractal image renderer under the X-windows environment and making it available as a “helper” application for Netscape and other browsers.

Text Searching

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:49:06 +0000

The Internet is increasingly a vast information resource. Information is frequently stored in large text files. The project is to study methods for finding text items satisfying user specified criteria, usually in the form of keywords or logical combinations of keywords. The most important part of the project consists of investigating the efficiency and effectiveness of search methods for large files that consist either of running text or are organised into records.

Concordance Builder

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:47:41 +0000

A concordance is a text that references another text indicating every place where a particular word or phrase has been used. The project involves the development of software that will allow concordances to be built automatically with options such as context sensitivity and near equivalent words and phrases.

Font conversion tools

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:47:16 +0000

There are number of different ways to store the information relating to fonts used in GUI based systems. The X Window environment and MS Windows have different sets of standards. The project involves a study of the different standards and the development of software to convert between the different standards especially in the X window environment.

ASCII Art to GIF converter

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:45:53 +0000

Many online documents (such as the RFCs) prepared before the days of the WWW make extensive use of “ASCII Art” (diagrams made up from normal characters). The project is to develop software to convert such diagrams into GIF (or similar) images suitable for incorporation in WWW pages.

HTML analyser

koolkampus — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:45:14 +0000

Part of the activity of a search engine is to analyse the text of HTML pages to determine the URLs of further pages to examine. Whilst examining the contents of pages it would also be possible to generate a variety of statistical reports about the HTML. As well as generating reports on the size of pages, it should also be possible to determine the number and size of included images and “dismantle” frame based pages. The project is to develop software that will perform the required analysis as part of a larger system.