Review of 'Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0', Working Draft 19 January 2009

All,

As of my action [1] I was appointed to review your Working Draft from 19
January 2009 regarding 'Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for
Media Object 1.0'.

Short version: Nice use cases and good requirements. In order to increase
readability, the content needs to be improved, esp. sections 1 to 4.

Full version:

===============
 Major issues
===============

+ Add a clear scope paragraph. I learned very late (somewhere in the section
'1. Introduction') that you are actually mainly targeting videos.

+ Even though I always believed I know my work I was not able to decode:
'The "Ontology for Media Object 1.0" will address the intercompatiblity
problem by providing a common set of properties to define the basic metadata
needed for media objects and the semantic links between their values in
different existing vocabularies.'

 - what is 'intercompatiblity'?
 - what are media objects?
 - what are semantic links?

+ And it continues: 'The scope is mainly video media objects, but we take
also other media objects into account if their metadata information is
related to video.'

 - how related?
 - which metadata?

+ The figure in section '3 Purpose of the Ontology and the API' is nice but
somehow questionable. Do user adapt the API? Do user visualise the API?
Isn't the ontology itself the API? In which language (formal or logic-based)
is it defined? What *is* the API?

+ Rather than having an almost empty section '4 Terminology' that merely
refers to RFC2119 you should use this space to define *your* terms (such as
media object).

+ In section '5.6 User generated Metadata' you use RDF/Turtle without any
warning, hint or reference.

+ Regarding '6.7 Requirement r07: Introducing several abstraction levels in
the ontology' I'd say this is an absolute must. If you can't talk about the
different abstraction layers, I guess the effort is pretty worthless.


=================
 Minor issues
=================

+ the TOC is not well-formatted, although pubrule-checker [2] seems not to
complain - rather use use <ol> and <li>

+ in the section 'B References' the labels of [XGR Image Annotation] and
[XGR Vocabularies] are mixed up (I think I remember seeing the latter
document already, somewhere ;)

+ you want to go for a W3C Note, right? Then you want to remove the
'(non-normative)' part in the references. You are not normative, hence as
well not non-normative.

All this said I guess you need a major revision of this WD. I think the UC
and the requirements as they are present are valuable and convincing, but
the reader needs more explanation in the beginning. You can't assume that
everyone has followed your WG-internal discussions and instantly knows what
you mean by media object or API.


Tracker, this is ACTION-36 and I'm gonna close it.

Cheers,
      Michael

[1] http://www.w3.org/2009/01/28-mediafrag-minutes.html#action01
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-annot-reqs/,pubrules

-- 
Dr. Michael Hausenblas
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Lower Dangan,
Galway, Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://sw-app.org/about.html

Received on Saturday, 31 January 2009 20:52:13 UTC