Natarajan Meghanathan

Software Application for Automated Transcript Analysis Natarajan Meghanathan

In this book, we present the design and development of a software application to automate transcript analysis and pre-requisite verification during course registration, which is a significantly time-consuming and error-prone activity when done manually. The first set of chapters present the theory behind the software: an innovative Reverse Hierarchical Search (RHS) algorithm proposed by us, for directed-acyclic graphs (DAG) and trees. Given a priori knowledge about the purpose of the data structure, the RHS DAG/tree can be appropriately constructed (for node insertion) to efficiently search an element in a reverse hierarchical order. All nodes that are found in the search path are added to the solution space. To avoid crowding the solution space with revisited nodes, any previously visited node information is re-used and duplicity of nodes is prevented. RHS performs better than the conventional Depth First Search algorithm by avoiding path retracing. The second set of chapters present in detail all the phases of the development life cycle, including an analysis of the security features of the software. The application is developed in Java, with MS Access as the database back end.