Week 3 - Heavy Data

Revisiting Rails

At the base of our project lies an Open-Source Web Framework called Ruby on Rails (RoR). We are utilizing RoR in an unconventional way totally ignoring the web component that developers often associate with RoR. We are leveraging RoR for its design archeticture and interoperability. Specifically its design for handling interfacing with the database using models and its use of Rake Tasks. The interoperability that RoR introduces into our project is with the utilization of Ruby Gems. We began by using it as a foundation and a bootstrap into a large project handling a great amount of data.

Big Data

The Chromium project relatively speaking is a large project. Specifically speaking the data that we are extracting from it in of itself is the big data at hand. Considering the amount of information we are collecting and the meta data we are producing. As well as the associations produced among the collected information exponentially raises the amount of data. RoR helps allevite this information handling by providing that model and functionality for establishing relationships among our model objects. Rails scalability also lends itself greatly.

Data Storage

This week there was heavy emphasis and focus on the database and our data models. Due to this large data set and the relationship we are trying to reveal our database structure has been a moving target. Further more since this is a Research-Oriented project implementation methods are different. Our database structure is a testament to this.

This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.