Structure of use cases

DanC:

> This is a good start, but it's not clear to me how the customer/client
> gets value yet.
<snip/>
> Could you (or somebody...) flesh this example out a bit? Tell me
> more about the user... are they trying to find John Smith's
> email message to send them email? Or are they trying to bust
> John Smith for some crime? Or invite him to a party?

No problem - can do.

Might be useful to discuss use cases at a general level as well hence this
thread. Are we moving towards a use case having the structure (quick draft):

  Description/Context:

  Audience: (e.g. application, user, toolkit developers, ....)

  Value/Why:

  Implications:
    Technical discussion

  Other:
    General notes - to ensure they don't get lost.


The structure can't be too long and I think each section must be completed
for all use cases (that is, no sections that work for only half of the UCs -
hard to evaulate systematically later).

Any one what to add/refine/alter etc this list?  What experience is there of
using these?

	Andy

-------- Original Message --------
> From: Dan Connolly <mailto:connolly@w3.org>
> Date: 11 March 2004 15:01
> 
> On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 07:23, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
> > Let's start with a simple case as much to find out what a use case is:
> > 
> > Suppose an application wishes to find the resources in a knowledge
> > base for people with the name "John Smith".  The knowledge base is a
> > collection of vCards in RDF (see [1] for RDF version, see [2] for the
> > definition) e.g. an address book or an enterprise directory.
> > 
> > vCards have a property vcard:FN (FN is "Formatted Name" I think) so
> > we want those things with a value of "John Smith" for property
> > vcard:FN. 
> 
> This is a good start, but it's not clear to me how the customer/client
> gets value yet.
> 
> If you take the system I work on, cwm, and ask it
> 	?WHO vcard:FN "John Smith".
> it'll dutifully bind ?WHO to _:bnode23o4u23 and report
> 
> 	[ vcard:FN "John Smith" ].
> 
> i.e. yes, there is somebody/something that has vcard:FN "John Smith".
> Gee thanks. The user probably wants his contact info, if he's
> using the vcard namespace.
> 
> Could you (or somebody...) flesh this example out a bit? Tell me
> more about the user... are they trying to find John Smith's
> email message to send them email? Or are they trying to bust
> John Smith for some crime? Or invite him to a party?

No problem: are we moving towards a use case having the structure:

> 
> Can you say something about why writing a program on top of
> rdflib or XSLT doesn't suit this user's needs?
> 
> > (I used vCards in this example just because its one we use in the Jena
> > tutorials and find it easy to communicate to people.)
> > 
> > 	Andy
> > 
> > 
> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-vcard-rdf-20010222/
> > [2] ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2426.txt

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 11:48:47 UTC