Final Year project ideas???

[fishsponge]

I am in my final year at university atm, and as part of this year i have to write a massive project (10,000 - 15,000 words). It must be related to my degree (Computer Science), and preferably related to real-world problems, although that's not *essential*.

my interests are in networking, web-based stuff, and maybe a bit of databases, so i would ideally like to do some kinda web site with a database backend. All of this must be on linux/unix... i hate windoze.

A good idea a friend of mine had was to create a "Friends Reunited" web site for people on his course. While this has been done before (at friendsreunited.co.uk) it's still a good idea, because it's taylored to his course in particular, and he's designing it from scratch.

Does anyone have any ideas at all about what i could possible do my final year project on?? I know this is a lot to ask, but if you have any clues, please let me know!!

thanks in advance...

[fishsponge]

OK... here's an idea for my project that i had yesterday, please let me know what you think.

OpenOffice uses XML as it's native format for documents.

Web Browsers use HTML as their native language.

What if someone sends you an OpenOffice document and you don't have OpenOffice? you can't read it, right?

What if i create an XML database (using MySQL) to store OpenOffice documents in, with either an XSL or XHTML 1.1 front-end that displays them in HTML format?

The database could have different categories (or directories) for documents, and possibly some kind of version control.

It could also be searchable.

Given the nature of XHTML and XSL, i think it could be displayed in different ways as well... so you could swap the document over to being white text on a black background, for example, or make the fonts bigger for visually impaired.

I can see lots of potential here... plus it's a very new technology.

What do you think?