You are asked by the organisers of the Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE), to design…

You are asked by the organisers of the Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE), to design a database that captures as many requirements as possible. The Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE, formerly Workshop on Internet and Network Economics) is an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas and results on incentives and computation arising from these various fields. Invited speakers of previous WINEs include not only many famous theorists from prestigious universities in the world, but also top researchers from many big businesses, such as Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, IBM Research, Google Inc., ebay Research Labs and so on. Participants of WINEs come from universities and industries as well. The organisers anticipate several hundred papers to be submitted for the conference. All the submissions are to be reviewed by referees and, due to the length of the conference, no more than 100 of the submitted papers are to be accepted. Each paper that is submitted will be classified into one of the conference topics. WINE19 will last for 4 days, during which 8 topics (e.g., “Mechanism Design”) will be discussed in two parallel streams. The conference sessions will be held in 2 large lecture theatres, with each session lasting a maximum of 2 hours and being dedicated to one of the topics; each topic takes 4 sessions (one per day). Therefore, each day there will be 4 sessions at each lecture theatre, summing up to 8 sessions per day (one for each topic). Each paper is presented in exactly one session during a 20-minute slot followed by 5 minutes of questions. The chair of the Programme Committee appoints the Senior Programme Committee (SPC’s) members. Every SPC must be an authority in at least one of the conference topics and is solely responsible for reviewing all submissions within his or her topics of expertise. Normally an SPC handles several submitted papers and assigns each paper to three referees. It is the organisers intention that at most 16 papers per topic will be accepted. Several hundreds participants are expected to attend the conference. Each participant typically plans to attend some of the sessions of their interest and may also present their own accepted papers, if they have any. When enrolling, every participant is required to provide some personal data (e.g., title, name, affiliation, address, etc.) and state which session(s) they wish to register for; this is required for calculating the individual fee for every single participant. The standard single session fee is £30. The following discount scheme will apply: 20% reduction for all participants with papers accepted, 30% for participants who actually present their papers at the conference and 40% for the session chairperson. Every participant can register for as many sessions as they wish, provided the selected sessions do not clash. The required database is to hold all the relevant data about the organization of the conference, including information about participants, the sessions they registered for etc. The necessary details about all the papers which are accepted for presentation (together with their session allocations) are also to be stored. The basic function of the database is to provide information on the conference programme and registration status of the participants.

Task : A database designer that possibly didn’t know how to create a proper Conceptual Data Model using Entity-Relationship modelling, created a large relation schema to store all the data associated with the registration information of participants to sessions, together with information about the accepted papers that are to be presented in a session (e.g. who was the SPC that handled a particular paper etc). The relation has the following schema:

ConferenceData (participantID, participantName, participantAddress, sessionLocation, sessionDate, sessionStartingTime, sessionDuration, topicID, topicName, paperID, paperTitle, SPCID, SPCName)

You are required to decompose, using the formal process of normalisation, the ConferenceData table into relations which are in 3rd normal form. In the absence of any data you may assume that the table is flattened. You are not supposed to add any further attribute, like authors or presenters of the papers. You should present your work logically providing details about the result of each stage of the normalisation process with clear annotations and explanations.

Note • Note that the problem description, discusses a much more general scenario, so some of the information that is described there, might not be useful for your task. However, the scenario will be useful for identifying the functional dependencies.