Milk Road

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Project Goal

Milk-Road is a database management system with a "retro" interface, built using Microsoft Access. Inspired by Silk Road—a famous dark-web marketplace from around 2011-2013—this project repurposes its dataset to create a shop platform for data management. Our goal is to simplify database navigation by creating a simple UI for shop owners to manage administrative tasks, such as adding, searching, and deleting data. In essence, we didn't just build a database management system; we also created an administration system.
 
 
 

Tech Stack

The Milk Road project uses various technologies, including:

• Canva : Interface Design for Access.
• Access : Database Management System with GUI (Graphical User Interface) feature.
• HeidiSQL : Open-source administration tool for various databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)

Features

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The GUI is an important thing for the system's usability. It includes :

• Visual Dashboard: Designed an interactive dashboard for easy navigation between tables, descriptions, and queries.
• Auto-Update : Structured raw Silk Road data into 6 relational tables, simply put that changes in one table (e.g. Product) automatically updated linked table (e.g. Seller) to maintain data consistency.
• Query-as-report : With SQL, we produce prebuilt reports in the system, such as Total Product Sold. This is also accessible from the dashboard

Cross-Table Management

For the dataset management, we want it to be simply and also support daily tasks, so the system includes :

• Quick Searches: Instant filters like “Find Seller by Product” let administrators locate critical details (e.g., seller wallet address) without manual table scans.
• Validation Rules: Validator for tasks like “Add Product” or “Add Order” , it blocked mismatched formats (e.g., text in numeric fields) and incomplete entries.
   
   
   

Demonstration

This is the demo video :
 

Reflection

At first, reviewing the dataset left us a bit puzzled—there were numerous tables spread across different links. Even finding the data that fit with our project goal took some time.

But, throughout this journey, I found that communication is actually important. Those weekly chats, to check progress, helped us to focus on what is important and identify each other's struggles. For example, we have a discussion around the question, "Did we need this table?" which led us to remove lot tables, that proven unused in the Milk Road. Embracing compromise and welcoming suggestion allowed us to work more effectively as a team.
 
 
 

Credit

Jalu Cahyo Senodiputroas my partner.
 

Dataset citation :

Nicolas Christin. Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace. To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2013.
Preliminary version available as CMU CyLab Technical Report CMU-CyLab-12-018. (Also: arXiv 1207.7139 [cs.CY].) July 2012 (revised November 2012).