Course Description and Goals
This course introduces students to important and fundamental topics in data and search informatics. It is appropriate for the incoming CS or Informatics graduate student who has an interest in the area of data and search and wants to learn more. It is also appropriate for graduate students outside the School of Informatics who want a better understanding of the key concepts in the area. It is offered once a week in the evening, and does not require programming experience.

The course will be taught seminar style where discussion of the material is facilitated by a faculty who has expertise in the area. Common threads running through the course ensure the student has a unified understanding.

Since this may be the first seminar course a graduate student will take, the course will spend time on how to read and understand scholarly papers in the field. The course is open to all students of a graduate standing. A good comfort level with computing concepts is desired but not necessary.

Students will be asked to study assigned scholarly papers prior to the time they are discussed, and will be expected submit abstracts on each assigned paper. As the semester progresses, a student's analysis of a particular work or topic should reflect an understanding of the topics already covered. The course will culminate with student group project presentations. The project explores one of the topic areas of data and search and applies it to a research question or to a potential product.

Please feel free to contact Professor Groth or Professor Plale with questions.

Agenda:

• Week 1-2 (Sep 8,15): course intro and data visualization (Groth, Plale, Van Gucht)
• Week 3 (Sep 22): metadata foundations (Robertson)
• Weeks 4 (Sep 29): ethical, social, and legal dimensions of data (Shankar)
• Weeks 5-6 (Oct 6,16): queries/searches over large and complex data (Groth)
• Weeks 6-7 (Oct 16, 20): indexing techniques for data and XML representation and storage (Wu)
• Weeks 8-9 (Oct 27,Nov 3): provenance of data: its capture and use (Plale)
• Weeks 10-11 (Nov 10,17): knowledge/artificial intelligence; use case applied to provenance (Leake)
• Weeks 12-13 (Nov 24,Dec 1): search languages, their computational complexity and expressiveness (Van Gucht)
• Week 14 (Dec 8): student presentations
• Week 15 (Exam Week): student presentations. Exam time for our class is scheduled for 7:15-9:15 on Fri Dec 19. We will make every effort to hold class at the regular scheduled class time (Monday night) during exam week.