Re: first couple of use cases

On Sun, 10 May 2009, Shelley Powers wrote:
>
> I'm posting links to the first couple of use cases. Ian, you'll want to 
> pay particular attention the first one on annotation, as I believe you 
> misread the original use case request.
> 
> Links are at:
> 
> Annotation 1: http://realtech.burningbird.net/print/657

The text you suggest, if I understand correctly, is:

| Within a writing published on the web, I want to add annotation into the 
| text to highlight specific facts, but I don't want such highlighting to 
| distract from the text, so I don't want it to be visible. An example of 
| the type of annotation I may make is to highlight the word "Napoleon" 
| and annotate this word with an assertion that Napoleon is a person, and 
| to add further information, that the person, Napoleon, is related to 
| France (a country).
|
| I write on many topics, and so I may make use of several different 
| vocabularies in order to perform my annotation. In addition, I may have 
| to create my own vocabulary if the annotation I want to make doesn't 
| match any of the known and previously published vocabularies. If I do, 
| I'll do so in such a way that there can't be a possible conflict with 
| any other vocabulary.
|
| Once my text is documented, I want to be able to access this annotation 
| at a later time, separate from the document. To do this, I'll process 
| each of my writings with an application that will pull out this 
| specialized annotation, for aggregation and later query. In addition, 
| by using a standard metadata annotation technique and model, the data 
| can also be accessed by search engines, making the data also available 
| to others.

I don't understand this. This is indeed more like Kingsley's original 
text, but it's not a use case scenario. It doesn't explain _why_ anyone 
would want to do this.

What is the problem that these annotations are solving?


> Search 1: http://realtech.burningbird.net/print/654

This is similar. It mixes a proposed solution and a scenario: "I do 
something and then hope something else happens". The important part is the 
"something else happens"; we should not decide how this is solved ("I do 
something") when writing down the problem description.


(Also, it'd be really helpful if we could keep scenarios shorter -- one 
reasonably-sized paragraph or so. It's very hard to properly evaluate 
descriptions that are that long.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 01:06:21 UTC