Yasaman Bahrami Samani
M.Sc. Candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Adrian Fiech

Implementing a Web Application for The Neighbours Project

Department of Computer Science
Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 11:00 a.m., Room EN 2022

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Abstract

Lack of diversity and generational differences are always considered as major social problems. In 2014, to improve some solutions regarding these issues, the research centre for the study of Music, Media and Place (MMaP) at Memorial University of Newfoundland developed a cultural project named “Neighbors” which focuses on lived cultural exhibition. Neighbors project offers a Phone application as well as a Web application. The Web application is the main focus of this master’s project.

The goal of this project is to develop an interactive Web application which offers different cultural stories. In addition to having major features of a good Web application, such as user-friendliness and security, this project is intended to offer a fuzzy search functionality which helps their users to find and investigate their favorite stories easily.

To develop a good search and recommendation system functionality, PageRank as one of the most popular ranking algorithms is utilized. This ranking system is designed by Google to create a satisfying large-scale search engine. This search engine offers a list of Web pages containing the exact search terms as well as those relevant pages that have higher importance scores amongst the rest.

By mapping our dataset network to the World Wide Web network and modifying the PageRank formula in a way that contains the impact of number of mutual tags between stories, we initiated neighbor’s ranking formula. The search provides meaningful results containing the stories most relevant to the searched keywords.