School timetabling XML format API Wiki

Introduction

The motivation for this project has been to create an API for easily accessing, modifying and creating data in the specified XML format from within Java. The project was started in July 2010 and will hopedully see sporadic work as and when I have time.

Personally this projected was motiviated by two reasons: I needed a relatively simple project to become acquainted with the NetBeans IDE (previously I have always used Eclipse); and a desire to access the available highschool timetabling data in this format within existing Java timetabling visualisations developed for my DPhil (e.g. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1432542).

Highschool timetabling benchmark XML format paper

This project is based on the paper An XML format for Benchmarks in High School Timetablin, 2009, by Gerhard Post , Samad Ahmadi , Sophia Daskalaki , Jeffrey H. Kingston , Jari Kyngas , Cimmo Nurmi , David Ranson , Henri Ruizenaar. This paper appears in the Annals of Operation Research http://www.springerlink.com/content/33h2538774428k55/.

More details on the Highschool timetabling benchmark XML format, and current datasets, can be found here http://wwwhome.math.utwente.nl/~postgf/index_eng.html under the School Timetabling heading.

Goals

As well as providing an API for reading and writing data in the highschool timetabling benchmark XML format the API should eventually provide functionality for evalutating solutions in this format. Initially I intend to develop a GUI application that will enable editing, visualisation and evaluation of data in this format; it is anticipated that this API could provide the basic data model for this and other simple school timetabling applications.

Data Exchange

The main purpose of the XML format is to faciliate better data exchange amongst timetabling researchers; the main purpose of this project is therefore to make it easier to generate and use data in this format.

Tools

UML

The project uses ArgoUML to maintain and edit associated UML diagrams. Initially I had intended to use the NetBeans UML functionality however this is curently not part of the NetBeans 6.9 platform.