Comments on section 2

Greeting everyone.  I've just gotten caught up on the recent discussion on
the mailing list and wanted to send some comments on the Research Drivers
document.  I hope that these are still relevant in light of yesterday's
meeting.  These comments span both particulars to that document and
broader issues --- it should be clear which comments are which.

Nick Matsakis

Comments on Section 2: Problem Definition

2.1.  I think it might be worthwhile to strengthen the connections between
the different problem domains of SIMILE in this section.  The overarching
problem I see here is that of providing an architecture for information
search and retrieval that is scalable across the personal, community,
institutional, and global domains.  These correspond roughly to haystack,
[?], libraries, and semantic web problem statements. Beginning the section
with a statement to this effect might help provide more context. Of
course, as stated this is a huge and ill-defined task.  So, perhaps some
language that grounds things in the realm of metadata interoperability
would be useful too.

My only other comment on this section is that I find the research funnel
diagram in 2.2 confusing. A brief text description of each component and
its relation to the others might suffice.