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Masters in Information Systems
Course Descriptions

About the Program

MSIS Home

Admission Requirements

Foundation Requirements

Testing Out of Foundations

Degree Requirements

INFS Course Descriptions

Pre-approved Electives

Advising

Plan Of Study Form

Self Evaluation Form (MS-word)

Accelerated BS-MSIS

For GMU CS students

For GMU IT students

Graduate Certificates

Data Mining

Database Management

Electronic Commerce

Information Engineering

INFS course descriptions are also listed in the University Catalog

Undergraduate Courses

INFS 310/IT 308 Program Structure and Design for Business Applications (3:3:0). Prerequisite: MIS 201, or IT 103 or CS 161, or equivalent. Teaches structured programming and design using a high-level language. Focus is on program design, coding, debugging, and documentation. A computing lab is included.
INFS 311/IT 314 Database Management (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 310 or CS 112. Study of the logical and physical characteristics of data and their organization in computer processing. Course emphasizes data as a resource in computer applications, and examines database management system (DBMS) software and its design, implementation, and use. Computing lab is included. Lab exercises use one or more DBMSs for business applications.
INFS 312 Computer Architecture and Operating Systems (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 310 or CS 112. Introduction to computing system hardware components, architecture, organization, and operating system software concepts. Course provides basic experience in assembly language programming for modern microprocessors and examines techniques for system evaluation and selection. Computing lab.
INFS 315 High-Level Programming Languages (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 310 or CS 112. Study of the structure and application of high-level languages by stressing the design and implementation of data types, data structures, and algorithms. Computing lab is included. Credit for this course does not count toward the requirements for a major in computer science.
INFS 316 Software Systems Engineering (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 310 or CS 211. Study of programming environments, including software tools and control of software development for large information systems engineering projects. Computing lab is included.
INFS 414/IT 414 Advanced Database (3:3:0). Prerequisite: IT 314 or equivalent. Explores advanced concepts of database modeling using enterprise-level database management system. Topics include object-oriented database processing, data integrity, transactions, locks, concurrency control, backup, recovery, optimization, data mining, Internet databases, server programming, and security.
INFS 462/IT 462 Information Security Principles (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 312 or equivalent. Study of security policies, models, and mechanisms for secrecy, integrity, availability and usage controls. Topics include models and mechanisms for mandatory, discretionary and role-based access controls; authentication technologies; control and prevention of viruses and other rogue programs; common system vulnerabilities and countermeasures; privacy and security policies and risk analysis; intellectual property protection; legal and social issues.
INFS 498 Independent Study in Information Systems Engineering (1-3:0:0). Prerequisite: 60 credits; must be arranged with an instructor and approved by the department chair before registering. Directed self-study of special topics of current interest in INFS. May be repeated for a maximum of six credits if the topics are substantially different.
INFS 499 Special Topics in Information Systems Engineering (3:3:0). Prerequisites: 60 credits and permission of instructor. Topics of special interest to undergraduates. May be repeated for a maximum of six credits if the topics are substantially different.

Foundation Courses

INFS 501 Discrete and Logical Structures for Information Systems (3:3:0). Prerequisites: Six credits of undergraduate mathematics. Study of discrete and logical structures for information systems analysis and design including basic set theory and proof techniques, propositional and predicate logic, trees and graphs, finite state machines, formal languages and their relation to automata, computability and computational complexity, formal semantics-operational, axiomatic and denotational approaches. Credit cannot be applied to any graduate degree in IT&E or the BS degree in Computer Science.
INFS 515 Computer Organization (3:3:0). Prerequisites: Undergraduate courses or equivalent knowledge in structured programming in a high-level language. Computer hardware organization: arithmetic and logical operations; combinational and sequential logic; machine representation of numbers, characters, and instructions; addressing techniques; microprogramming; reduced instruction set computers. Symbolic assembly language and interrupts and input/Output organization, are also covered. Credit cannot be applied to any graduate degree in IT&E or the BS degree in Computer Science.
INFS 519 Program Design and Data Structures (3:3:0). Prerequisite: SWE 510 or equivalent. Study of the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms applied in programming solutions to application problems. The coursestresses programming in a modern high-level language. Laboratory required. Credit cannot be applied to any graduate degree in School of Information Technology and Engineering.

Graduate Courses

INFS 524 Database Management Essentials (3:3:0). Prerequisites: One programming course, and 6 credits of college math. Relational database management systems. Covers logical and physical database design, query languages, and database programming, and examines commercial systems. Computing lab. This course does not count toward MS programs offered in the Computer Science Department.
INFS 565 Database and Distributed System Security Principles (3:3:0). Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. This course introduces information and distributed system security fundamentals. Topics include notions of security, threats and attacks; legal-ethical issues; security evaluation; data models, concepts, and mechanisms for database and distributed system security; inference in statistical databases; basic issues in operating system, application and network security.
INFS 612 Principles and Practices of Communication Networks (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515, 519, and SWE 510; or equivalent. This course introduces the principles of computer networks and their applications to the Internet. Details of layering, protocols, performance, resource allocation, management, security and other contemporary issues related to networks are discussed. Examples of the course material are protocols such as HTTP(S), DNS, TCP/IP, RSVP, SNMP, algorithms such as Dijkstra's link state routing, security measures such as firewalls and encryption, principles behind them and analysis of their performance. No substitutions can be made for this class.
INFS 614 Database Management (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515, 519, and SWE 510; or equivalent. Introduction to database systems, emphasize the study of database models and languages and the practice of database design and programming. Topics include the Entity-Relationship model, the relational model and its formal query languages, SQL, the theory of relational database design, and object-oriented and logic-based databases. Computing lab is required. No substitutions can be made for this class.
INFS 622 Information Systems Analysis and Design (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515, and 519; or equivalent. Integration of computing technologies, systems analysis, system design practices, and management criteria in the design of large-scale information management and decision support systems. Cases and computing lab are included.
INFS 623 Classical and Web Information Retrieval (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515, and 519; or equivalent. Study of models and methods for storage and retrieval of unstructured information, such as documents. Topics include information retrieval models, automatic indexing, document clustering, statistical thesauri, search techniques, performance measurement, answer visualization, and search engines for retrieval from the World Wide Web.
INFS 640 Introduction to Electronic Commerce (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515, and 519; or equivalent. This course studies electronic commerce from both managerial and technical perspectives. Topics include e-commerce models and concepts; Internet and web protocols and infrastructure; e-commerce marketing and branding; security protocols and standards; e-commerce payment systems; and case studies of business-to-consumer, business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, and e-government.
INFS 650 Development Frameworks for Information System Applications (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 501, 515 and 519; or equivalent. Principles and methods of building commercial applications within high-level framework. Tools for system construction are considered, along with variety of programming languages, component integration, and design methods. Applications investigated through program construction in varied settings, such as database systems, graphical user interfaces, and prototyping. Programming projects are required.
INFS 697 Topics in Information Systems (1-6:1-6:0). Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Special topics in information systems not occurring in the regular INFS sequence are presented. May be repeated for credit when distinct offerings of the course differ in subject.
INFS 740 Database Programming for the World Wide Web (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 614. Information systems accessible through web and Internet are becoming prevalent. Course focuses on technologies and industry standards for accessing and manipulating persistent data that are suitable for web applications.
INFS 750 Application Frameworks for Windowed Information Systems (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 601 and 650. Studies the use of object-oriented visual application frameworks in building event-driven windowed systems. Topics include windowed systems as event-driven systems; central architecture of windowed systems and the encapsulation of windowed architectures by object-oriented frameworks; and analysis and design of windowed applications. The various features of visual application frameworks will be illustrated using a variety of information systems applications. Programming projects.
INFS 755 Data Mining (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 614 or equivalent. The course covers techniques for designing and maintaining large data warehouses. Topics covered are OLAP, star schemas, data integration, data cleaning, maintenance of views in the presence of updates to the sources, and query processing of warehouses. The second part of the course focuses on mining data from the warehouses. Topics include data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, association rules, mining of time-series and complex data. The emphasis is on scalability over large data sets.
INFS 760 Advanced Database Management (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 614. Study of advanced database models and languages, database design theory, transaction processing, recovery, concurrency, distributed database, security and integrity. Recent developments and research directions are discussed.
INFS 764 Object-Oriented Database Systems (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 614 or CS 650, or permission of instructor. The knowledge of an object-oriented programming language such as C++ is highly desirable. Study of concepts and systems of object-oriented (OO) databases. Topics include OO-design, data models, query languages, new data types, and implementation. Also included are a detailed case study and a project performed on a OO-DBMS. Various prototypes, commercially available systems, and emerging standards are surveyed.
INFS 770 Knowledge Management for E-Business (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 622 or permission of instructor. This course studies knowledge management (KM) from managerial and technical viewpoints in context of large organizations doing business over web and Internet. Topics include KM life cycle for knowledge creation, aggregation, dissemination, and sharing; ontology modeling, design, and engineering; role of standards such as XML, RDF, web services, and semantic web for e-business; business rules and reasoning engines; and digital rights management for e-business.
INFS 772 Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 614. Course covers the role of intelligent agents in cooperating to access, harvest, sift and winnow information and knowledge from the semantic web. Topics include agent architectures, practical reasoning and deductive agents, beliefs-desires-intentions (BDI) framework for agent reasoning, commitments and actions; Semantic Web ontology languages, description logics, reasoning and rule languages; and agent communication languages, protocols and standards.
INFS 774/IT 874 Enterprise Architecture(3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 622 or permission of instructor. This course presents the basic concepts and methodologies for the discipline known as Enterprise IT Architecting within a framework, structure, and methodology. Enterprise IT Architecting is a necessary step for designing and developing a system of information systems. It includes the definition of the business, work, functional, information and technical perspectives. As such, it is the enabling approach for the system development process that builds complex information systems.
INFS 780/CS 780 Data Mining in Multimedia Databases (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 755 or CS 750 or permission of instructor. Covers advanced algorithms for data management, learning, and mining large, multimedia databases. Issues related to handling such data including feature selection, high dimensional indexing, interactive search and information retrieval, pattern discovery, and scalability to large datasets are discussed. Mining techniques and data types to be covered include texts/web, images, videos, DNA, temporal, spatial, spatiotemporal databases, graph mining, stream mining, and data visualization.
INFS 785 Data Mining for Homeland Security (3:3:0). Prerequisites: INFS 755. This course covers analytic techniques for investigative analysis. Topics include small world graphs as way to model groups and organizations, relational data mining with emphasis in predictive models, alias discovery techniques and profiling.
INFS 790 Information Systems Policy and Administration (3:3:0). Prerequisites: Completion of all core courses, and preferably taken in final semester prior to graduation. Capstone course that integrates the technical and executive policy issues of information systems. Critical executive issues are examined through case studies and a comprehensive individual project. No substitutions can be made for this class.
INFS 795 Special Topics in Data Mining Applications (3:3:0). Prerequisite: INFS 755. This course focuses in the interdisciplinary applications of data mining. Topics are selected from the following: web and text data mining, e-commerce, bioinformatics, security and intelligence analysis, data mining of economical data. Each topic will be analyzed in depth and the state-of-the-art techniques in the application of data mining to the field will be extensively covered.
INFS 796 Directed Readings in Information Technology (3:3:0). Prerequisite: Graduate standing in information systems with at least 12 prior credit hours in MS Research and analysis of a contemporary problem in information system development. Prior approval is required by a faculty sponsor who supervises the student's work. Written report or thesis proposal is required. A maximum of 6 hours may be earned. (In order to register, the student must complete an independent study form, which is available in the department office. The form must be initialed by the faculty sponsor and approved by the department chairman.)
INFS 797 Advanced Topics in Information Systems (3:3:0). Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Special advanced topics not occurring in the regular INFS sequence. May be repeated for credit when distinct offerings of the course differ in subject.
INFS 798 Research Project (3:3:0). Prerequisite: 18 hours of credit applicable towards MS Research project chosen under the guidance of a full-time graduate faculty member, resulting in a written technical report. Prior approval required by a faculty sponsor who supervises the student's work. (In order to register, the student must complete an independent study form, which is available in the department office. The form must be initialed by the faculty sponsor and approved by the department chairman.)
INFS 799 Thesis (1-6:0:0). Prerequisite: 18 hours of credit applicable toward MS Original or compilary work evaluated by a committee of three faculty members. (In order to register, the student must complete an independent study form, which is available in the department office. The form must be initialed by the faculty sponsor and approved by the department chairman.)

For Further Information

Additional information on the program is available from the MSIS Student Advisor (csadmin@cs.gmu.edu)