From weidai@eskimo.com Tue Nov 11 19:05:13 1997 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 17:54:41 -0800 From: Wei Dai To: Martin Dickey Cc: vkl@cs.washington.edu Subject: project proposal Internet Book Review Database There is a lot of information about books on the Internet, but it can be hard to find reviews of a specific book. The reviews you're looking for might be scattered across the Usenet, FTP archives, and different web sites. I propose a public database that would contain user-submitted reviews and reviews gathered from the Internet. It would also contain URLs to reviews that are copyrighted. The database might also contain author biographical information, plot summaries, etc. Users would be able to search by author, subject, title, reviewer, review date, and rating. It's an open question how ratings should be compared across reviewers. Users would also be able to set email alerts based on these criteria to inform them of new reviews. For the purpose of this course, the emphasis would be on database and HTML user interface design and implementation. If the project is continued beyond this course, a challenge would be to populate the database with real data and get users interested enough to contribute to it.