Most major websites are driven by a database system. The information that appears on the website is stored in the database system. Major websites like Amazon or Facebook have many millions of records stored in their database system.

If you have never worked with a database system before, you might imagine that the data for a website is stored in one long list, similar to an Excel spreadsheet. But this is not at all the case. Data is spread across many tables. Each table represents one category of information. For example, a website that sells clothing online would have categories like Item, Customer, Customer Address, Order and Brand. Each of these categories (which are called “entities” in the database world) would have further information (“attributes”). An item, for example, would have attributes like item number, description, title, price, and so on. Some attributes, such as Customer, might have attributes which are also entities, like Customer Address (which consists of address1, address2, city, state, zip). You may recognize these ideas from designing classes in your Java programming class.

Your group has been assigned a website. Your job is to analyze it, and figure out the likely organization of the underlying database. To do that, you need to figure out what all the entities are, and what the attributes are for each entity. You will do this in class in your group, and submit one report through Blackboard. To help you, look at the PubMed example which we looked at in class.