Assignment 4: Group Formation & Project Details

In this group assignment, we are asking you to come up with a more detailed description of your project that especially focuses on the input data and input sources that are critical for implementing your project idea. You should create a detailed project plan that covers the following points in detail.

1. Refined Abstract

Create a refined project abstract of about 250 words that covers the essence of your project: Why is it useful to the end user? Which are the most relevant technologies that you will use? Which are the "features at risk" where you see the biggest challenges to actually get the project to work as planned?

2. Group Members & Roles

• Who are the members of your project group?
• What are the individual skills each of you contributes to your group?
• Which roles and responsibilities will each of you take on when working on the project?

3. Sources

In this assignment, we specifically focus on detailing the input sources that are used within your project. Clearly identify each source of input data that is relevant for your project. Additionally, for each source:

• State how you will obtain the data and the detailed meaning of data that is produced by this source.
• What are the requirements on this data?
• How will this data be converted to the Activity Streams format? Identify the main parts of an Activity Stream that originates from this source: for instance, who is the "actor", what are the "object", and "target", and which "verb" will you use?
• Do you require to create a hierarchy of verbs (i.e., are there more general verbs and more specific verbs in your model?)? In this case, specify how they relate to each other! Don't over-complicate things, simplicity is a huge bonus in shared settings.
  
• If the source produces different types of activities, what is the relationship between them?
• Will this source produce events that are uploaded in near real-time to ASbase or will it produce reports that are uploaded to the platform after processing is done?

Compile all information about the input data that is used in your project in a detailed data dictionary. In the future, we will ask you to provide a formal, machine-readable, dictionary of all types of Activity Streams that are handled by the different tiers in your project - keep this in mind already now ;-)

Finally, especially if your project requires you to build or modify specific hardware, we suggest that you already start working on this part (although it is not part of this assignment).

4. Transformers and Consumers

Identify each transformer, and each device or program that will consume the information produced by your transformers. Connect this information with your data dictionary. Specifically:

• For each transformer and consumer, state which input data this entity will consume and what it will do with that data. Here, we encourage you to split up your service logic into multiple transformer tiers all of which publish back to ASbase - this will open up many more combination options across groups down the road!
  
• For each transformer, additionally discuss which data it produces from its inputs. All such data should be published back to ASbase in the form of an Activity Stream. Document the data that is published by each transformer in the same way as you did that for sources in subtask 3.