Ideas for methods to use for a project

[Guest_imported]

Hi
I'v been tasked with a college assignment to create a database for an Imaginary police force...
Basically the dabase base has to consist of cross-referencing tables such as: Criminal, Criminal Gang, Incident, Evidence and reports...

One of the main problems I first thought of is that items such as reports will be large sets of text that cannot fit in a standerd field. I would somehow need to link key words from the text field(i.e time, data, name) to the other tables.

The idea is that all of the tables need to be cross-referencing..
For example if someone looked up a Criminal gang, they could then be linked to the individual criminal and the Incidents that there were involved in.
Another main objective is to use the reports bit as an central intelligence pit. This is where documents can be anaylsed and linked accordingly.

This is just a sample of the brief, the brief i have been given is 50 odd pages long.
Anyhow on top of all that I have to produce somekind of gui(probably java) for the average user.

This project has got me completely confused.

Any ideas, methods, additional software to use will be appriciated. I'm not expecting the project done for, just a starting point of what needs to be done.

thanks

 

[teado]

I'd ask the instructor first for some guidelines as there's so many ways this project could be accomplished. One thing I think we'd all agree on is focusing more on database design, rather than what the GUI and reports would look like.