Welcome
This web site presents the Computer Science Honours Project "Towards a formal specification of course structures". The project was undertaken by Patrick Frey and supervised by Prof. John Hurst at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineerung at Monash University (Clayton campus), Melbourne, Australia. The project was started in July 2004 and ended in June 2005.
Abstract
As an institution in Australian higher education, Monash University offers a large variety of courses leading to higher education degrees. The courses and their components, which are called units, need to be documented comprehensively for current and prospective students, for student advisors and the schools, the faculties and the university itself. The main objective of this project was to find formal specifications of unit and course structures, represented by XML Schemas, in order to improve the quality of unit and course descriptions. A main goal was to resolve existing linguistic ambiguities in the description of the relations between units. We also highlight possible applications of a more sophisticated and integrated unit and course model which is based on XML Schemas and documents. The emphasis is on the usefulness of formal specifications not only for documentation purposes, but also as a basis for new application areas, such as exploring enrolment possibilities and testing whether enrolment choices made by students are valid in the context of their course. Based on the results of this project, we suggest two closely related applications: firstly a Student Assistance System and secondly an Enrolment Check System.