Use case: AFS-2: "Tell me about ..."

Use case in a more organised style: doing this has already suggested a
change in format:

	Andy


== Task & Roles

The user (a person) is involved in gathering information about
http://www.w3.org/ because they are writing a news article about W3C's new
look web site as an example of excellent web design. The user is a member of
W3team (this is just to avoid security issues).

== Value/Why

Finds all information available, without a priori knowledge of what to
retrieve.  Ensures the user agent has as much information available, but
relies on agent to be able to communicate that to the person.

== Description

This style query is something that comes up in some applications is a
different style of request "tell me about..." where the thing(s) of interest
may be a known resource with URI or it may be something that can be
identified (e.g. by some property as a key).  What the query answer contains
is not constrained by the query.

What comes back depends on who is asked: in this case, we have a URI
http://www.w3.org/:

+ If the user agent asks CVS or content management system, it might tell me
who has edited the page and the date.

+ If the user agent asks a traffic monitoring station, it might return the
number of hits today.

+ If the user agent asks the web server at www.w3.org, it might return the
title.

+ If the user agent asks a news site, I might get information on press
releases.

Indeed, the web server might all the above by collecting lots of different
together and sending them back.  In this case, the user agent asks the web
server, and a source of traffic monitoring, and the user can write about
when the page was installed and how much use is made of it.

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 12:15:41 UTC