330 CIS Project First Handout
September 4, 2008
As Web 2.0 continues to grow, we see more and more community-driven information sharing websites. News sharing sites have become especially popular, two examples of which are Digg.com (established in 2004) and newsvine.com (established in 2006). These sites allow users to share, comment and vote on what they nd to be the most interesting news across the web, with no editorial censorship behind the scenes. In this project, you will create a servlet-based application that allows registered users to share links to their favorite news stories, articles or videos and publish the most popular pieces (as voted on by the majority of users) on the front page of your site. The basic elements that your application should provide are the following: 1. The application must allow users to register, and maintain basic information such as name, age, location and profession. Each registered user must be allowed to share URLs and vote on those that they nd interesting. 2. Each shared URL may either be private (only seen by friends) or public (seen by anyone), and must also be unique across the list of all links. Along with each URL, you should keep track of its title, the date and time it was posted, the category it belongs to, the number of votes it currently has, and some descriptive content about the piece. 3. Only registered users may share and vote on site content, but guest users should be allowed to search. 4. Users should be allowed to comment on the pieces. For extra credit, implement threads of comments, so that users may reply to individual comments. 5. Each registered user has a friends list composed of other registered users. In order to see what your friends have been doing, RSS feeds should be generated containing the latest activity of each friend (i.e what they have posted, commented or voted on). The feeds should be readable by any common feed reader. 6. You should allow basic search capabilities that allow to users search pieces based on popularity, category, time and keyword. We expect that keyword searches will use inverted indices implemented over relational tables.
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In addition to the elements found above in most news sites, you should implement two extra features: When users search the database for posted URLs, the result may contain outdated or non-existent links (for example, a link to a video may have been taken out due to violations of copyright rules). Hence, every so often (e.g., weekly or monthly), you will need to crawl posted links to check whether they are currently active. Inactive links and references to them must be removed from the database. Most websites (like Digg and newsvine) provide a recommendation system that is used for recommending stories that users may like, based on their past activity of either voting or contributing. The algorithms for deciding what should or should not be recommended to a user vary across websites (some can be very complex), but here we will provide a combination of results to the user: For every piece that a user has either shared, voted or commented upon, nd other users that have also voted or commented upon it, and rec...