Universal Sports Database - complete

The thesis is now complete. Write up is done, the web interface is usable. Although far from what I want it to be, it's not a bad starting point. The real power of the system comes from my universal schema, which is described in my paper.

I was able to add tennis, NASCAR stats. Added an interface, where different sport's game data use different views. The GamesController determines what sport the game is in, the chooses the appropriate view. That was pretty much the only customization in terms of different sports. Everything else is uniform.

A package of my code will be available for download soon. If anything, it should give beginners of Ruby on Rails some insights into using MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. There is also a LOT of code dealing with data scraping using Hpricot and Ruby in general.

Website url: http://sports.bc.edu:3000/sports
Thesis: http://www.lawrencechang.net/download/thesis.pdf

Code: http://www.lawrencechang.net/download/thesis_code.zip

One thing I never bothered to do: the server is still run from the standard development WEBrick server. But I don't anticipate enough traffic to justify moving to a production server.

(note for future: the website url may expire in summer 2008 due to Boston College activation/network reasons. If this happens I apologize, all the code is available for download.)