Ideas for interesting (database related) computer science projects

Computer users keep complaining that someone should write an application X, doing Y.
Every year, hundred of thousand of computer students are given programming assignments, as part of their classes. Instead of having implement something useless, maybe we should suggest they implement something useful.

Here are some suggestions of computer projects. The list will keep growing, but here is a start.

- conference management tool (CMT):
Academic research is based on conferences where people submit papers that are reviewed by peers. The reviewing process is complicated. Some tools have been developed, but they are a but outdated, in the sense that they do not embrace the new communication modes of today.
The idea of the projet is to create an open source extensible state-of-the-art CMT (see Microsoft CMT) with some features such as: off-line reviews, chat, etc.

- calendar portal:
Each field (mine is databases) comes with a lot of events (submission deadlines, conference dates, etc.). Today the information is disseminated via email (e.g. dbWorld mailing list). It would be nicer to have variaous calendars (in the sense of iCal) people can subscribe to. For instance, ACM conferences, IEEE conferences, etc.
The idea is to build a web application where people can enter the event information and where people can subscribe to the various calendars.
See iCalShare, as a nice example of a calendar portal.