Some use cases

Here are my use cases.  A bit obscure, maybe, but they're representative
of the kinds of things that should be *so* much easier than they are.
Also, at the end, a bit of a response to Dan Connolly's concern.

1)  Automated bibliography generation.  I'd like to be able to type in a
few keywords that would identify a book to one of the major book
retailers (or maybe to a library catalog or a search engine) and be
shown a list of choices that includes the one I mean.  I'd then like to
select my choice and have a bibliographic entry produced automagically.
I am constantly looking for details of a bibliographic reference, and
this relies on such a (relatively) simple ontology to accomplish.

2) (Re-)implementation of Squeal/Para-Site.  In WWW9, Ellen Spertus
reported on a system for describing web sites.  She subsequently
demonstrated that one could easily produce some very lightweight but
useful tools -- a "similar page" finder, a moved page relocator, a home
page finder, etc. -- within this system.  Again, the underlying ontology
isn't that difficult -- in this case, it's really an ontology *about*
web pages -- but the tool was custom-built and relatively finicky to
extend.  Rebuilding it in a shared ontology would make it significantly
more useful.

Lynn Andrea Stein

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Now the message I was going to send Dan....

Interesting.  I had to leave the telecon before the HW was discussed,
but I did read the assignment.  Several times, in fact.  It wasn't until
I'd read it after Dan's message, and then reread it once more again,
that I saw the parenthetical phrase:
    (written responses earlier to mailing list encouraged)

I did my homework, but I understood the (first) deliverable to be a
readiness to participate in the brainstorming today.  I've thought about
what I'd look for in an ontology language, and about my use cases, but
I, for one, didn't realize that I was expected to share them on the
mailing list rather than in the telecon.  I am extremely sympathetic to
Dan's concern that this group will only succeed with the active
participation of its members, but also believe that expectations must be
clearly spelled out.  With all due respect, prior posting of use cases
wasn't.

Lynn

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2001 08:40:56 UTC