As part of an introductory databases class at Stanford, I designed LitSearch, a database application which stores data on nearly 4000 titles and their authors as well as literary criticism related to these works. It also contains a full text index of about 100 of them. The project allows users to perform searches on the book metadata, as well as full-text searches on the bodies of the works. It also features a "motif search" which uses synonyms to find passages that are similar to a phrase that the user enters into the search box. It's very unrefined, but can produce some interesting results.
The data was collected from a number of public-domain sources, including Project Gutenberg and The Internet Public Library.
This page describes the various stages of my project, from the conceptual E/R diagram, to the Java Servlet-based front end. Additionally, I decided to port my database project to MySQL, which I also describe below.