Our masters project started out as Lisa's final project for Alex Milowski's XML Technologies class in the Spring of 2004. Dismayed by the general lack of standardization and usability among the various SIMS professors' syllabi, Lisa designed a model and an application that would not only capture all essential information about a syllabus but also present various views of both a single class and combinations of classes. For instance, you could extract a view that would show you everything you had due in all your classes for a whole week. Observing all this during Lisa's in-class presentation of her project, Carolyn was very impressed by the ingenuity and utility of the project and asked Lisa if she'd be interested in continuing development together as the basis for their SIMS masters project.

We figured that we needed to start early. Lisa's existing code comprised a fairly functional prototype, but we decided to take a step back and rework our data model before moving forward with the application. Under the guidance of Bob Glushko, we applied document engineering techniques to create a conceptual model of a syllabus, analyzing at least one syllabus from each SIMS faculty member along the way. We used this model as a basis for fleshing out and improving the prototype application, and we had it up and running in time for a serious round of testing by the beginning of the Fall 2004 semester.

During the Fall 2004 Semester, we were fortunate enough to have 12 courses participating. For several of these courses, our application was the only course website or schedule that was made available to students. This gave us a fantastic opportunity to see how well our original data model functions in real use, and to also debug our application. Throughout the semester, we made refinements to both model and application responding to feedback from professors, TAs and students.

After nearly a year in development, the project was finally given a better name than "the syllabus project" or the "syllabus app": SylViA, for Syllabus Viewing Application. Along with a new name, we also did a final schema review, which prompted a revision of our transformations. We also turned our focus from the display of data in the system, to the inputting of information. We, along with first year masters student Sarai Mitnick, are developing a user interface for the application in Marti Hearst's User Interface Design and Development, and Lisa will be testing our project's usability in Nancy van House's User Needs and Usability Assessment.

By the end of the semester, SylViA will be complete, unleashing SIMS' first syllabus management system on unsuspecting professors and students.