\section{General Project Description}

In this chapter we will give a general description of the project. What does it do and how is it done? We also give an overview of the used techniques. At the end of this section a figure with a representation of the project and the techniques is given.

\subsection{The project}

We have made a liquor database which is accessible via a web interface. The main purposes of the web site is to gather information and put it into a database. The information can be attained in two ways. One way is to manually insert the information, the other way is to add a remote RSS feed to the website. The website will take the information from the RSS feed en put it into our own database. We have first chosen three standard RSS feeds, but decided during implementation to bind the RSS feeds dynamically. \\

One can bind and un-bind RSS feeds to the website. Therefore the site can contain many more and other information than liquor only, just by connecting other RSS feeds. We started this project as one with a liquor database, so for the project, liquor and cocktails are used as initial information. \\

Another functionality of the website is a search engine. It is possible to search through various messages with given keywords. The title, message content or both are searchable. You can specify in which news category or which liquor type you want to search. This can also be used as a filter. \\

It is also possible to subscribe to a RSS feed of our own. This RSS feed contains the last twenty entries of the entire database.

\subsection{Overview of the used techniques}

At the beginning of the project there were given four technologies. From these four, the project had to contain at least two. We have chosen to use all four of the technologies, but during the implementation we had decided to drop the XSLT part. The reason for that is that we had to little knowledge of XSLT to find a good problem which we could solve by using XSLT. \\

The following technologies are used for the project:

\begin{itemize}
  \item \textbf{XML / XML schemes}: This is being used to gather and store the information.
  \item \textbf{XQuery / XPath}: This is being used to save the information correctly and to search for data.
  \item \textbf{Web interface}: This is being used to access the information.
\end{itemize}

To support the technologies we used the following techniques:

\begin{itemize}
  \item \textbf{RSS}: This is being used to gather information from other websites. We use it also to deliver information.
  \item \textbf{PHP}: This is used to built the website (along with HTML).
  \item \textbf{Simple XML for PHP}: This is a PHP module which gives the programmer the opportunity to work with XML and XPath statements. This is for instance used to built the outgoing RSS Feed.
\end{itemize}

\subsection{Representation of the project}

In the figure one the next page you can see a representation of our project. The website with the XML database is the center of the project. The website has a PHP script which will be run six times per day. First the script gets the RSS binding from the database, then it obtains the information from the RSS feeds and puts these into database. A user can interact with the site (search information or inserts new information). The website transforms the user interactions to Xquery/Xpath, so it can interact with the database. A user can also get an RSS feed from our website.

\begin {center}
  \includegraphics[width=150.0mm]{DiagramPottepeiFinal.png} \\
  Fig 1. Representation of the project
\end {center}
