Kopernik

Introduction to Kopernik Observatory

Kopernik Observatory & Science Center is a non-profit organization which is opened in 1974. Located atop a 1720 foot hill in Vestal, NY, the Observatory has been one of the best equipped public observatories in the Northeast United States for nearly 40 years. It provides educational program for students and their families.

Information about Previous Project

Relational Database

In the previous project, previous team created a new database and combined four databases into one and implemented ten tables inside of the database. As it is mentioned in their final report, it is relation-based SQL file and it is implemented in MySQL environment. The previous project team only worked on the Kopernik Talent Search database which has 4894 rows (including some duplications). We contacted with a team member of the previous project Nagihan Cay and learned that they used Oracle MySQL Workbench Tool to extract the data from excel tables to import them into MySQL. Since the table names and its attributes might be changed in the future, the document does not consists of their information.

Entity-Relationship Model

Web Application

By reading the previous project’s user manual, we found out that they designed some new General User Interface (GUI) and also they made some improvements on the web pages which are created by the project team before them. This improvements involve more input fields and student search boxes. They created several user-friendly web pages and explained these web pages purposes in their final report. A screenshot of an example for a web page (Figure 2[2]) can be found in the appendices part.

Information about Current Project

Objective

Kopernik Observatory gives tens of educational programs to hundreds of students. The information about the students, their families, class, and memberships requires a big database which cannot be handled manually. Their old database is implemented in FileMaker Pro7. Although it is an effective technology for small companies, Kopernik has lots of data to store. The high amount of data makes the FileMaker Pro7 very inefficient. Not the database structure itself, also the user interface of the FileMaker is very complicated. It has lots of textboxes and unordered lists which makes users to confuse about what they are doing, especially the unexperienced users.

Kopernik Science & Observatory Center Database and Web Application Project is created by previous project team to improve the Kopernik’s current database system and its interface. To achieve this, the previous team started implementing a new relational database structure and a web application. Our project has three stages:

1. Database Stage – In this stage, we will start examining the database structure which is created by the previous project team, then we will continue from where they left off. Our main priority will be the reconstruct of the current database system.
2. Web Application Page Stage – In this stage, we will check the previous project team’s web pages and decided the adequacy of the current web pages. If there will be a need for more pages, we will create them.
3. Miscellaneous Stage – In the miscellaneous stage we will try to fulfill the extra specifications. This stage can rather be done or left out according to our schedule. If we can finish the first two stages, we will focus on the more “unimportant” functions or modules such as “Spell checking”, “go back buttons” etc.