Final Exam Study Guide, SIMS 202, Fall 2000
Final Exam Preparation Guide, Fall 2000
The SIMS 202 final exam will take place Monday December 11 from
9:30am-12:30pm in 202 South Hall. (We'll have people spread out to
the room next door as well.) This will be an open-book, open-note
exam. Please bring your own pen/pencils (to be fair, and to avoid
printing issues, we won't be allowing computers during the midterm.
It's ok if your handwriting isn't great.). We'll supply the paper.
Each person will work individually. The exam period is three hours;
we'll try to design it to require about 2.5 hours, but be prepared to
work quickly.
The exam is comprehensive, meaning it will cover both parts of the
class. However, the emphasis will be on materials covered since the
midterm.
Each question will be worth an indicated number of points. Partial
credit will be awarded.
In your answers, please balance conciseness with illustration of all
of the requested information. (In other words, don't write a lot of
things that aren't asked for, but try to address all of what is asked
for.)
To study for the exam,
- Be sure you understand the material that was covered in lecture and
have read and absorbed the corresponding material in the readings.
- Be sure you can do activities similar to what was done in the
homeworks.
-
We will try to write some questions that require you to generalize
from what you've learned and synthesize ideas. So be sure you have
thought about the ideas covered in lecture, readings, and homeworks.
These ideas and abilities should be at your fingertips. There won't
be time during the exam to read up on topics you haven't studied.
Below are shown the major topics we've covered since the midterm and some example
questions. Please note that these are examples of the types of
questions we will ask. They are (probably) not the
exact questions we will ask. Furthermore, we will probably ask
some other types of questions too, in particular the kind where we
give you an example of some information and ask you to do something
with it (design an ER diagram, convert to a hierarchy, etc.)
You should also review the material from the first half of the class;
refer to the
Midterm Study Guide.
- Topic: Information
- Example Questions:What is the information life cycle? What are different ways of
measuring information? What are different ways of defining
information? What are the main goals of the second half of this course?
- Topic: Metadata
- Example Questions:What are the motivations behind creating and using metadata
systems like Dublin Core, MARC, AACR II, etc? What is the purpose of
authority control? Is this a type of controlled vocabulary? Why or
why not? What is a DTD? How do you create an XML representation of a
print magazine?
- Topic: Classification/Category Design
- Example Questions: What does Svenonius consider to be the primary
difficulties with using controlled vocabularies? What are the
differences between how hierarchical and faceted category structures
are typically used in computer interfaces. Illustrate with examples
we've discussed in class or homeworks.
What is the relationship between attribute/value distinctions and
category structure decisions? How is a classification thesaurus designed?
- Topic: Lexical Relations
- Example Questions: How is polysemy different than synonymy?
Create an example that illustrates the difference between symbols and
meaning, and shows their correspondence to one another.
- Topic: Human Category Structure
- Example Questions: Consider the "game" example from class. Why
does this example show that necessary and sufficient condition
satisfaction is not a good way to characterize how people use
categories? What is the difference between the word game and
the category game? What is the role of family resemblance of
attributes in the human category systems? What are superordinate and
subordinate categories in the human category system?
- Topic: Web Site Design
- Example Questions: What are the major steps in web site
design? How does information architecture differ from navigation
structure? What are important social considerations when designing an
ecommerce site (e.g., see Kohavi's guest lecture.)?
- Topic: Database Design
- Example Questions: How is a database different than a file
system? What are the benefits of a database system? What do we mean
by data independence? What are the benefits/drawbacks of the primary
database models? Entity-Relations Diagrams -- what are they for, how
do you create them? How do you normalize a relational model? What is
a join?
- Topic: The Design Process
- Example Questions: How is the database design process similar
to/different from the web site design process? Why are
sketches used by professional designers?
