Senior Design Projects

ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2020

Searchable database of intentional community research

Email **********
Name Angela Sanguinetti
Affiliation Cohousing Research Network and Foundation for Intentional Community

Project's details

Project title Searchable database of intentional community research
Background The Cohousing Research Network (CRN) and Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) are seeking a team of computer science students to complete a project. which will be housed on the CRN website (cohousingresearchnetwork.org). and linked to by the Foundation for Intentional Community website and most likely also the Cohousing Association of the US (CohoUS) website. CRN is a global resource center for cohousing research. serving as a clearing house of information for cohousing researchers. writers. journalists. building professionals. advocates. community members and community seekers. One of the valuable resources we provide. on our WordPress website. is a bibliography of academic research about cohousing. Currently. the bibliography contains limited types of pubications and we manually update it on an annual basis.
Description Our goals for this project are to make the cohousing bibliography searchable and. to the extent possible. automate the process of updating it. Tasks for the student team would include:

Identifying and selecting among tools and frameworks to enable desired features within our WordPress site

Designing and implementing the front-end search. sort. and filter interface for the website

Designing and constructing a back-end database for the bibliography with the required fields to enable searching. sorting. and filtering by author last name. year of publication. keywords. and name of publisher/journal

Automating (all or parts of) the process of updating the bibliography with new research. This will include researching possibilities and selecting a method that is sustainable for CRN to maintain. Methods may involve connecting to academic library APIs and/or web-scraping scripts to search research databases. and find and store cohousing research citation data in our cohousing bibliography database according to the fields and formats we define to enable search. sort. and filter functions on our website.

Developing an administrative web interface for the CRN team to be able to access and modify the automated bibliography updating processes
Deliverable The deliverable is a bibliography with search. sort and filter functions live on CRN's website. with automated processes that help streamline the updating process. enabling an expansion to more types of research as well as more frequent updates.
Skill set desirable Ability to implement efficient algorithms for high speed search results and filtering

Ability to write Python scripts for data analysis/retrieval etc.

Backend development skills (e.g.. JSONor AJAX. SQL).

Frontend development skills (html/css. javascript. frameworks like React or Angular)
Phone number **********
Client time availability 30-60 min weekly or more
IP requirement Open source project
Attachment N/A
Selected No
Team members N/A
TA N/A