Re: constraints use cases/stories? [was: a first tilt at the strawman]

Sorry for the delay, some idiot blew up my tube station! Use cases 
for constraints. Yes, easy.

Here are some simple stories

Scarlet and Bob work in a large bank. They trade in swaps and 
derivatives. They want to make sure that the swaps they create, that 
are due to settle in Hong Kong, are not set to settle on a date when 
the Hong Kong market is shut due to a national holiday.

Scarlet and Bob also want to know that the party and counterparty 
information is consistent.

Fred and Mary work for an online bicycle shop. They want to ensure 
that the catalogue price of a product is the same as that in their 
syndicated advertisements.

Helen and Xavier are software engineers. They wish to ensure that the 
instances in their UML collaboration diagram correspond to valid 
classes in their class diagram. They also want to ensure that the 
class diagram corresponds the code base and the deployment 
information.

Each of these imply constraints across the information. These 
constraints must be checked to see if they hold.

For a more detailed use case see ...

http://www.systemwire.com/FpML/2004/FpML-4-1/validation/2004-07-19/rules-english-eqd.html

These are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association 
constraints defining trade validity (alongside our reference 
implementation). Obviously there are more interesting x-document 
constraints.

Anthony









At 12:24 pm -0500 7/7/05, Dan Connolly wrote:
>Going back a bit to 8 Jun 2005...
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rule-workshop-discuss/2005Jun/0003.html
>where Anthony Finkelstein wrote...
>
>>  I do not believe that the answer to rule
>>  language interoperability is to create, as is implied in the
>>  strawman, a metalanguage. I think there are simpler and more
>>  pragmatic ways forward that have to do with standardising the ways in
>>  which rules are referenced, assembled into rule sets and made
>>  available to reasoning engines. These should be our first point of
>>  attack if we are genuinely concerned with interoperability. Almost
>>  inevitably, given the demanding technical issues, a logical
>>  metalanguage risks either academic abstraction or excluding major
>>  parts of the picture.
>>
>>  In any event I am going to put a strong plea, as I did at the
>  > workshop to ensure that the scope of the initiative includes the
>>  handling of constraints an important sub class of rules.
>
>I'm not sure I know what "handling constraints" means.
>
>I'm sure there are technical definitions, but actually what
>I'm more curious about just now is to hear a story a la...
>
>Scarlet and Bob work in [an accounting firm or whatever], and they
>[have some problem]; before W3C standardized "handling
>constriants" [life sucked in the following ways...].
>Now that there's a W3C standard for handling constraints,
>[life is good in the following ways...].
>
>Bonus points for stories that involve anarchic scalability
>(cf http://esw.w3.org/topic/AnarchicScalability ),
>unintended reuse, and other web-like characteristics.
>
>As a footnote to the story, a pointer to your favorite
>technical definition of "constraint" and related terms
>might help, Anthony.
>
>By way of example/precedent, I think the OWL use cases were
>a big success. http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/
>   * 2.1 Web portal
>       * 2.2 Multimedia collections
>       * 2.3 Corporate web site management
>       * 2.4 Design documentation
>       * 2.5 Agents and services
>       * 2.6 Ubiquitous computing
>
>
>And I'm pretty happy with the way the RDF Data Access
>use cases and requirements have established a
>shared vocabulary and motivated the technology.
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-dawg-uc/
>
>   * 2.1 Finding an Email Address
>       * 2.2 Finding Information about Motorcycle Parts
>       * 2.3 Finding Unknown Media Objects
>       * 2.4 Monitoring News Events
>       * 2.5 Avoiding Traffic Jams
>       * 2.6 Discovering What People Say about News Stories
>       * 2.7 Exploring the Neighborhood
>       * 2.8 Sharing Vacation Photos with a Friend
>       * 2.9 Finding Input and Output Documents for Test Cases
>       * 2.10 Discovering Learning Resources
>       * 2.11 Finding Out New Things About People
>       * 2.12 Browsing Patient Records
>       * 2.13 Finding Disjunct Conditions
>       * 2.14 Finding Film Soundtracks
>       * 2.15 Managing Personal Identities
>       * 2.16 Customizing Content Delivery
>       * 2.17 Building Ontology Tools
>       * 2.18 Working with Enterprise Web Services
>       * 2.19 Building Tables of Contents
>
>--
>Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
>D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E


-- 
_________________________________________________________________________

Anthony Finkelstein
Systemwire
Director of Strategy

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Received on Friday, 8 July 2005 16:41:03 UTC