This is a group project By Ardavan Khalij, Amadou Sarjo Jallow, Brenda Ordoñez Lujan, Florent Nicolas J Grimau, and Milan Pavle Ilic.
This project is under the supervision of Dr. Bas Ketsman, Mr. Tim Baccaert, and Mr. Samuel Ngugi Ndung'u for the course, Open Information Systems at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
The goal of this project is to design and implement an information system using techniques seen during the lectures. First, you will individually develop one aspect of a larger system. Subse- quently, all students are brought together in groups of 4 or 5 students to develop a single system based on the smaller systems. However, this should involve minimal or no changes to each stu- dent’s system. This mimics the fact that real-world information systems are sometimes wildly heterogeneous while having the need to inter-operate effectively, without the ability to change much about the original systems.
The theme of this year’s project is e-commerce. In an absolutely tragic accident, Llamazon’s billionaire founder and executive chairman Jeff Cezos is stuck in an orbit around the Earth1. As a consequence, the international e-commerce market has come to a grinding halt, investors are losing faith in Llamazon and its stock prices are falling. We are using this opportunity to create our own e-commerce platform, in order to meet the demand for online shopping. The backbone of this platform is an information system that each of you will develop.
Your e-commerce system can consist out of the following modules:
• Module 1: Products - This module can primarily concern itself with the maintenance of a product catalog. That is, it could keep track of different product categories (e.g. electronics, books, office equipment, ...), products (i.e. name, price, ...), reviews, and more.
• Module2:Warehouses-Keeptrackof“fulfilmentcentres”aroundtheglobe,theproducts they have in stock, shipments that are incoming or outgoing, which delivery services or businesses are responsible for shipments, and other information.
• Module 3: Customers - Could concern itself with storage of purchase history, addresses, preferred delivery services, and more.
• Module4:Suppliers-Thismodulecankeeptrackofbusinessesthatsupplythegoodsyou will sell on the platform. This could be a direct supplier (i.e. the company that makes the product) or a re-seller (i.e. a company that has an online store and would like to sell through your platform), or others.
• Module 5: Delivery Services - Keep track of the companies that are able to deliver goods to the customers, the kinds of services they deliver (e.g. regular delivery, express delivery) or the tariffs (e.g. €5 per kg, ...), and more.
The precise architecture of a module, and the data you use are entirely up to you. You could base yourself on the data of existing e-commerce platforms, you can find open data, you can scrape data, or you could use a dummy data generator such as Mockaroo2. But, be sure to mention your data sources in the report.