Semester Project Information

Hydroinformatics Term Project Requirements

Goals

The goals of the Hydroinformatics course term project include:

Encourage independent, creative, and innovative thinking.
Provide an opportunity to implement concepts and technologies learned in the course.
Promote teamwork and shared solution-finding in a large complex technology project.
Synthesize concepts learned in the course and apply them to real-world problems.
Opportunity to present work to others and practice professional communication skills.

Teams

Students will be encouraged to form teams of 3 or 4 students to design and complete a project. Not every student will complete every task in the project, rather students will be encouraged to divide tasks among themselves and then follow up with each other to ensure the full project requirements are met. For example, you could assign one person to design and implement a database, another person could be responsible for developing an informational web site and interactive pages, another person could be responsible for writing scripts to process data. Each project will be unique and hence the distribution of labor between members in different teams will also be unique. It is important to ensure the entire team works together to brainstorm the project topic and regularly meets to integrate individual work, discuss progress and issues, and chart a unified path towards completion. The project will be graded using a combination of group self-assessment together with the instructor assessment of the final project presentation and report.

Topic Selection

You are encouraged to NOT conduct a final project directly related to one of your individual research projects. Rather it is more preferable to identify projects that are “complimentary” to the research needs and interests of all team members. We do not see this course project as a means for you to complete a specific part of your individual thesis research, but rather as a means for you to practice and learn skills that will help you and your team members in your research.

Project Requirements

Your hydroinformatics project must include at a minimum the following elements:

Develop a clear problem statement related to the collection, management, analysis, and presentation of water related data. For more information on problem statements, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_statement Links to an external site..
“Collection” of data from sensor sources or web sites. For example, these can be data collected as part of the iUtah or CI-Water projects. This can also be other datasets related to your group research interests.
Design of a relational database schema or other appropriate data storage mechanism to support and store the data and metadata collected. This design should include graphic representation of the data storage system or schema as well as a clear explanation of its elements.
Implementation of the designed database or data storage mechanism in a workstation or server environment. This includes creating the database or other system and “loading” your data into the system.
Manipulation or analysis of the data using an appropriate scripting language – targeted at addressing your problem statement.
Creation of appropriate data presentation materials (graphs, maps, interactive web pages).
Live presentation of your project to the class. This presentation should clearly describe the project problem statement, data collection, data storage design and implementation, any analysis or scripting, and final results.
Written project report (one per team) in the format of a technical or scientific paper following a template that will be provided.

Exceptions to these requirements will be considered in exceptional cases if the project team can provide sufficient justification.

Deadlines

Team formation: mid-September
Topic selection and problem statement: early-October
Progress report: mid-November
Final project reports and presentations: mid-December