[Swift-devel] Re: Potential programming languages related projects on Swift for Ian's Grid course?

[Ben Clifford]

The provenance database prototypes that I've been working on recently are 
perhaps at the stage where they would be interesting to work on as a 
student project.

Specifically, I have implemented some stuff which takes details of Swift 
runs (which procedures were executed, how they were executed, what files 
they took as inputs and provided as outputs); and puts those details into 
various forms of database (most completely SQL and XML databases at the 
moment; but also I'm investigating (to a much lesser depth) several other 
forms.

A. One project idea would be to more deeply investigate one of the formats 
(such as RDF, prolog, graphgrep) that I haven't had time to investigate 
properly (or some other form that I don't have on my list).

The project might include at least:

  i) implementing code (which needn't be of production quality) to 
store provenance data to the chosen format. this is not very hard and 
there examples for both SQL and XML already.

  ii) figure out the necessary queries and methods to solve, for example, 
the provenance challenge queries (which I have been using as some 
motivating examples)

  iii) write a report with the code from i, the queries from ii and some 
discussion about whether this database/format seems useful / easy to query 
/ high performance.

I'd be willing to provide a fair amount of support for this.


B. Another project idea would be to use the provenance prototype code in 
some application - either one that exists already from one of the 
application people on this list, or a simple application implemented as 
the first part of the project; then do some interesting stuff there. This 
is more vague - I'm not sure what the appropriate applications or the 
interesting stuff would be.

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