Abstract

Combinatorial block designs are in essence a multiset of subsets of a
base set with certain properties. Many statistical and combinatorial
properties are associated with block designs. These properties are often
computationally intensive to generate and therefore capturing them once
generated is important. This project, composed of three phases, aims to
create a system to represent, store and allow searching for a large
collection of combinatorial block designs. The first phase of the
project dealt with the representation of block designs. To fulfil this
step, the External Representation (Ext Rep) of Block Designs was
extended and re-implemented to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON),
creating version 3 of the Ext Rep. Fulfilling this phase dealt with
complexities in transforming designs in the predecessor version, which
was implemented in Extensible Markup Language (XML), to the newer
version. The complexities arose due to the inherent differences between
the two languages. Moreover, the new Ext Rep contains extensions to the
functionality that were not available prior. Block designs (represented
as Ext Rep structures) required a storage scheme that was created in the
second phase of the project. A carefully designed database schema was
created along with the choice of a suitable database engine. The final
phase dealt with an implementation of a web interface to the database
that hosted over two and half million designs which are searchable by
any of the Ext Rep criteria.