personas and use cases - being explicit about the *spec*'s users

Hi folks

Some thoughts after yesterday's F2F discussion.

http://www.w3.org/2010/POI/wiki/Use_Cases has a number of use cases,
dominated for now by 'guide' scenarios oriented towards "Person:
end-user", but with a few others tagged "Persona: interconnected
systems".

I suggest it is worth being more explicit about the latter, and
sketching some human-sounding potential users of the POI W3C spec(s)
such that we can think about them when creating and closing issues.

Here are some that came to mind from personal experience. They are
developer centric for now; obviously we have other stakeholders and
constituencies but for now:

"P3 is a backend developer working on a consumer-facing site that
aggregates POI descriptions from around the Web, and attaches social
information such as recommendations, endorsements and reviews. T has
been working on Web APIs (which have both JSON and XML versions, and
which use OAuth for app authorization), on data de-duplication and is
currently trying to choose between MySQL, Postgres/PostGIS and a
variety of 'NoSQL' options for their main database software. P3 has
been meaning to get around to making KML and RSS/Atom feeds or maybe
iCalendar feeds, but isn't sure which to do first or how to
QA/test/evaluate the results".

"P4 is a front-end Web developer working alongside P3. P4 is trying to
figure out how many Web frontends to build (main one, a mobile one,
'or do we want one for low-end phones and another for fancy recent
smartphones?'). P4 understands that page filesize can be a practical
issue for some of their (potential) users in developing countries, and
also even for wealthier users when they're travelling and hence
roaming. S/he wonders whether the smartphone users should be using an
app that caches everything, anyhow? P4 knows Javascript pretty well,
is excited to
play more with HTML5, has heard a couple of talks about Microformats
and has heard a bit lately about Google/Facebook adoption of RDFa. But
in the short-term is more concerned to figure out what markup etc to
put into pages to add social recommendations (FB likes, digg etc.) or
Bing/Google/Yahoo maps, and is wondering if there's a way to get stuff
from their pages into users' navigation systems or personal mapping
environments like Google's My Maps, or a route-finder. Doesn't KML
have something to do with that?"

"P5 is an iPhone developer working alongside P4 and P3. S/he works
mainly writing Objective-C code for a social/location consumer Web app
that calls P3's APIs, although there has been a request to port
everything to Android so is wondering how much of the logic can be
pushed into Javascript for portability, or up into the server. The app
encourages the user to login using Facebook and Twitter credentials so
it can share info with friends, access 'social graph' and
recommendations/links, and share links. It uses the smartphone's
various geo-related APIs and tries to minimise the amount of traffic
pulled down from the 'net by using smart (contextual, personalising)
filters - or that's the  plan anyway. P5 is current debating with P3
how exactly to do this, and what kind of category system would best
support this given the hetrogenous nature of their data."

"P6 works alongside P3, P4 and P5 at a location services / social Web
/ mobile geo company, and juggles a variety of roles including
platform evangelism and new business development. This includes trying
to negotiate access to interesting new geo-tagged datasets, whether
this is via adoption of their platform APIs and formats, or giving
them Excel files on a data stick. P6 is interested in the idea that
there might be a new W3C standard for POI info, so that s/he could ask
for that instead, or so that these organizations would already have
made it available. P6 works on the assumption that much
this data will eventually be public anyhow and that they will
distinguish themselves by adding social/business value through
filtering, aggregating and linking it, and that to do so will involve
connecting
to a variety of other similar platforms since different users will
make recommendations/checkings/annotations using a variety of
services."

Others?

- developer within a platform ecosystem; eg. creating layar layers, or
KML data, or plugin/addon/calling of someone else's geo APIs
- someone navigating their own city
- someone navigating a city elsewhere when they are 'on roaming'
- someone creating a data mashup site that links info about
organizations with open public-sector datasets eg. schools, restaurant
health inspections, crime data, ...
- blind and partially sighted navigators (of their own city, or travelling)
- ...

Once we've a few more of these, I'd like to make sure we also have at
least 10 (ideally 100) POI spots described in human-friendly textual
form, that we can use to map into different concrete data formats. For
example we might finish describing
http://www.pathe.nl/bioscoop/tuschinski as a business, as a tourist
spot, historically interesting building or venue for watching movies.
We might
look at iCalendar feeds, RSS/Atom, KML and HTML home pages as
'carriers' for W3C POI data. All of this would I think better be
stored in a filetree than in wiki, ... perhaps we can discuss the
mechanics of CSV or distributed versioning options during the F2F?

cheers,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 30 March 2011 06:15:40 UTC