A Question-Answer Platform for St. Lawrence University CS 345: Database Systems Khang Duc Le, Nevaan Perera

Information is everywhere. There is so much information that, it is extremely difficult to find specific ideas, resources and opportunities suited to an individual’s needs. This is especially true for college campuses, and St. Lawrence University is no exception. Yes, as students, we can always look for answers from our friends, community assistants and campus faculty, however, asking questions anonymously, and gaining perspective from many campus phases is the most desired outcome. Therefore, we propose a question and answer platform aimed specifically for St. Lawrence University students, staff and faculty. Answers could be ‘up voted’ or liked and the best answer will be highlighted. Questions could be asked in many forms from text, checkbox, or radio-dials. Users can tag specific questions, upload pictures or videos and even specify their organization/department. Students can search for questions by name, tag, year asked or organization. All the questions will be stored in a database so anyone can search and view the questions and answers, at any point in time. Therefore, creating a database that stores and efficiently retrieves information is of paramount importance; thus, we propose a database design for such an application. Information stored in our database would include questions, answers, users, organization name, pictures, videos and tags. We hope to incorporate expandability and flexibility in our record system, that is tailored specifically towards St. Lawrence University and its culture. We propose creating a relational database which will help reduce data redundancy, and enable us to enforce referential integrity. Our database will be a wealth of knowledge concerning college life, and will help bridge the gap of asymmetric information, provide a myriad of recourses to students and enable students to gain insight into many issues and ideas on campus.