RE: Framing Use Cases (was: Annotating Bibliographic Information)

Doug - I responded in part last week and promised to get back to you on the second part. Sorry for the delay  (holidays got in the way).  

Briefly, no, I do not agree with your  "exemplar theory" as the basis for all use cases.  That's not to say I'm right and you're wrong, only to say I think we need others to weigh in.  

I do not think it is useful to try to cast all annotations in terms of (as you put it) "here's a bunch of people  in the wonderful future world of web annotations! "  because the essence of the use case becomes lost in the details. I think in many cases a succinct statement of the use case or story  is more useful.   That said, I think it is very useful to have some of the use cases expanded as you describe, but not all (or even most) of them. 

But again, I think we need other opinions on this.

Ray

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Schepers [mailto:schepers@w3.org]
> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 7:43 PM
> To: Denenberg, Ray; 'Web Annotation'
> Subject: Framing Use Cases (was: Annotating Bibliographic Information)
> 
> Hi, Ray, folks–
> 
> TL;DR:
> 
> Let's describe our use cases in a way that highlights the most common uses
> of Web Annotations.
> 
> 
> Long-winded version:
> 
> I took the liberty of converting your .doc file into HTML format
> (attached); this is the preferred format for W3C, for obvious reasons,
> not least of which is that it can be viewed in email clients and our
> online archives without opening it in a separate app. I hope this helps
> the conversation.
> 
> I took the further liberty of adding a couple of links that I found
> helpful in reading it; I didn't know before what BIBFRAME was, so I
> linked to the Wikipedia article on that; I also added a link to the
> BIBFRAME Annotation Model whitepaper, because I was confused about the
> way you were using the word "annotation". I hope my links help others on
> this list.
> 
> As I said on the last telcon, if the deliverables of this WG help your
> use case, that's great; if the data model or other specs can be tweaked
> to be more helpful to your particular need, that seems like a good idea.
> 
> The web has become the overwhelming success it is today because people
> took the basic building blocks provided to them, and used them for
> creative purposes unforeseen. Few people would have thought at the
> beginning of the Web, "hey, let's take this document format and use it
> to build full-powered applications." But that's what we did, and that's
> what makes it great.
> 
> So, if you see some of the basic building blocks of Web Annotations and
> think, "hey, we can use that to build a distributed bibliographic
> reference system that allows 'class inheritance' or 'subtyping' of
> bibliographic entries to add information (like whether our library has a
> copy of this book)", then that's useful, especially if it means that
> some of that content can be directly exposed through the web more
> easily. If we don't have to do anything special to meet your use case,
> and it just works out of the box, even better!
> 
> For me, however, that's not an exemplar of a Web Annotation. It's a
> specialized use with some overlap. Your technical terminology uses the
> word "annotation", but I think you mean it in a slightly different sense
> than what I'd call an annotation (and more like what I'd call
> "inheritance").
> 
> (For those not familiar with exemplar theory: if I ask you to name a
> type of bird, you're likely to say "pigeon" or "starling" or "hawk" or
> "duck"; you're less likely to say "ostrich", and even less likely still
> to say "penguin". These are all fine birds, but the latter 2 have fewer
> features in common with other birds. Members of a category that have
> more features in common with other members of that category are known
> as
> "exemplars".)
> 
> If an annotation only has a link selection, and no body (e.g., a
> highlight), is it an annotation? How about if the body of the annotation
> is simply a link to another lengthy resource, or there's no body but two
> link selections? How about if the body of the annotation is a link to an
> image or video, which is then rendered inline in the annotation viewer?
> Yes, those are all annotations, but they aren't exemplars, in my opinion.
> 
> Why is this relevant? When we're collecting use cases, we're not just
> making a list of all possible uses for a technology. We're communicating
> an aspirational goal for our desired outcome to a wide community of
> potential stakeholders, in an effort to get them involved because they
> see relevance to what they're doing; so you might think that we want to
> cast the net as broadly as possible. But we're also trying to convince
> them that this effort is worth investing resources in, and that the odds
> of success are high, which means that we are clear on our goals and
> priorities, and that we are focused on a set of smaller gains that lead
> toward broader wins.
> 
> With that in mind, my preference would be for our use cases and
> requirements to be framed in terms of those exemplars that the broadest
> audience is likely to relate to. It might be as simple as casting the
> actors. So, when I think of your cover art example, I might say:
> 
> Anna is reading a short story on her ebook reader, and the main
> character reminds her of a drawing by her friend; she annotates an
> instance of the character's name with a link to the drawing online. Ben
> works at a library, and has gotten permission to add the short story to
> their ebook collection; he wants to find cover art for it, so he
> searches an online annotation service for annotations on the short story
> that include images, and finds Anna's annotation. Ben obtains permission
> from the artist to use the image, and publishes the short story with its
> new cover art.
> 
> (I might have added some social aspect to it, like, "Ben replies to
> Anna's annotation asking for the source, and Anna connects him to her
> friend.")
> 
> This still covers your use case, but it does so in a narrative that
> emphasizes different aspects of the desired ecosystem; it's got the
> distributed aspect, an end user reading and annotating a selection in an
> ebook, online annotation services, linking to online image services,
> social media, search and discovery, all wrapped up in a story, with
> characters who have motivations. It feels less like "there's a
> collection of data in a database, we don't care how the data got there,
> and we searched the database", and more like, "here's a bunch of people
> in the wonderful future world of web annotations! Huzzah!" (And hey,
> maybe Anna works at a library, too, so this might be the very same story
> you told.) It includes an exemplar act of annotation, something that
> could only happen with web annotations, rather than a story that could
> substitute "Google image search" for "annotation" (of course, Google
> could index annotations to add relevance to their image search...).
> 
> You might think this is trivial, but I think it makes a real difference
> in the story we're trying to tell people about this new thing called
> "Web Annotations", which they are trying to distinguish from other
> technologies.
> 
> Does that seem reasonable to you?
> 
> Regards-
> -Doug
> 
> On 12/19/14 10:50 AM, Denenberg, Ray wrote:
> > At the recent call I promised to elaborate on the use cases I had
> > suggested, including cover art, and to try to explain why I think that
> > cover art really is an annotation use case.   In order to do that I need
> > to provide background on some of the thinking within the
> > library/bibliographic community about annotations (specifically the
> > thinking with the BIBFRAME project, http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/).  So I
> > have prepared a (roughly) two-and-a-half page discussion paper that
> > tries to provide background, in “layman” terms (i.e. for those not
> > familiar with library/bibliographic terminology).  The paper is attached
> > and I hope you will take the time to read it and to comment.
> >
> > (Note: I am not sure if this is the proper way to contribute a paper; if
> > not, let me know how.)
> >
> > Ray
> >
>

Received on Monday, 29 December 2014 15:16:42 UTC