We have identified the topic areas below, by division, where we would particularly welcome applications for phd study. These topics do not have specific funding attached to them, although the topics can be incorporated into a scholarship application. For details of available scholarships, please visit our phd funding and scholarships page. In addition to research within the themes below, you could also suggest your own topic, but you must ensure that you closely locate your research within leeds university business school. The result of this study is a written document which describes, analyzes, and structures the references found, identifies their benefits and drawbacks, and precisely lists the sources of the references at the end.

The resulting document is the student rsquo s first deliverable and will be part of the thesis. Having learnt from the literature study, in a second phase, the student starts with a conceptual design for solving the problems of the topic. This conceptual design proceeds hand in hand with me and is based on common discussions which take place weekly or every two weeks in my office. The conceptual proposals have to be written down in a more or less detailed way by the student.

Keys to Writing a Good Paper

If there is an agreement upon a concept, the student writes a preliminary ldquo final rdquo description about it which is a second deliverable for me and will later also be part of the thesis. The reason for this is that at the time of designing a concept, the student is fully aware of its details and thus able to write them all down. If the student described a previously devised concept at a much later point in time, s he would have forgotten many of the relevant details and motivations for the conceptual decisions. Another reason is that the student must practice the writing of reports and papers from the beginning. Based on the agreed concept, in a third phase, the student devises an implementation method for it, that is, a collection of data structures and algorithms.

This method is described in a document first, which is the third deliverable, before it is implemented in a programming language. Concepts, implementation methods, and implementations are added, modified, and described in written form. It is highly recommended to include all written parts in the same document with a meaningful structure explicit table of contents.

This will later help you to find the gaps in your thesis, concepts, and implementations. Basically, you have to revise the document, add parts, and write transitions between different parts. During all phases, it is expected that the student writes research papers together with me as the supervisor.

design and implementation of three dimensional spatial data types and their integration into database systems

abstract. So far, spatial databases have mainly dealt with the management of two dimensional geometric data. But on the other hand, our world is three dimensional, and a number of possible applications can be identified that would greatly benefit from a treatment of three dimensional data.

The idea of this project is therefore to incorporate three dimensional geometric information into spatial databases and hence into geographical information systems. Our research has led so far to a so called abstract model that identifies the essential three dimensional spatial data types. In this model, data types, operations, and predicates are formally defined on the basis of mathematical concepts like point set theory and point set topology. The task of this phd project is to continue this research and to design a so called discrete model for the abstract model. Since the abstract model is based on infinite point sets and functions and cannot be directly implemented, it is the goal of the discrete model to find finite representations for the infinite concepts of the abstract model and algorithms for the operations and predicates of the abstract model. The design of a discrete model has to satisfy a number of design criteria like the generality of the data type definition, closure properties of data types, and numerical robustness. Finally, this leads to the development of a computational geometry for three dimensional data.

A second important goal of this project is the incorporation of three dimensional data types, operations, and predicates into database systems and their query languages. The general problem is here how values of varying and very large representation length can be efficiently stored and retrieved in a database. Databases in general programming skills in c++, oracle 10g desired but not required knowledge.