Re: Draft report and use cases

PS: btw perhaps I'm over-reacting here. But reading words like "doing nothing" or "misleading", I felt the need to try and explain better my position, and my somewhat loose wording. And to defend a bit these use cases and other material which arguably won't fit as such into a (hopefully quite short) core report...



> On 2/17/11 10:40 PM, Thomas Baker wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:12:08PM -0800, Karen Coyle wrote:
>>> Basically, I see the use cases as providing information for the
>>> report -- but I'm not sure that there is a place for the clusters or
>>> cases in the report itself. To me the uses cases serve to identify
>>> *issues* by providing some examples of projects people are
>>> attempting or interested in. But those projects are just examples --
>>> and not necessarily representative or complete. As we develop the
>>> document it may be useful to use some of the use cases as
>>> illustrations, but unless they have a specific role in our
>>> exposition, I wouldn't try to force them into the report.
>>
>> I do agree that we should not force the use cases into
>> the report. And if we do nothing more with the use cases,
>> they will remain as frozen wiki documents -- and maybe that's
>> enough! I was thinking it could be useful to have an annotated
>> listing of use cases, perhaps in an Appendix, but that would
>> take some effort -- hence my suggestion that someone start by
>> proposing a solution. If I correctly understand your point,
>> you are in fact proposing a solution, which I take to be that
>> we just leave them as frozen wiki documents.
>>
>> In the absence of other proposals, doing nothing is at any
>> rate the default solution. I'm not going to argue that we
>> should divert resources and attention from other tasks to the
>> use cases, but I also don't think it would take much effort
>> to prepare a tidy list. On the other hand, if it is true
>> that the use cases, as a whole, present a misleading picture
>> of the real issues, that does indeed strengthen the argument
>> for simply doing nothing.
>
>
> I believe that the use cases are representative. I won't dispute that some points are missing. But it is overall really relevant. And since the global exercise that we've undertaken is extremely context-dependent, we should make sure that this context can be *properly* accessed in a way or the other, when people read the main report. It should be in our deliverables!
>
> Before continuing on defending my view on use case, though, I'd like to move one level up. I realize that there could be a misunderstanding here. When I've mentioned "report" recently, I had quite a broad vision of it--a document that could including several appendices which could be more-or-less independent documents. Perhaps it's just clearer to drop any use of the word "appendix". And adopt the view that all material that it too big/detailed or even partial, will physically go into separate "deliverables"--for which the core report should provide a reading guide. Such an organization was in fact hinted in the charter [1].
>
> This includes the set of use case clusters, but also the vocabularies, and the CKAN datasets, at least. Even though these are just a snapshot (at least when the group has to disband--I hope the CKAN group will live on!), they can be useful to our community. See the discussion we had on the LOD-LAM summit yesterday, and the comments around the JISC RDTF metadata guidelines Monica circulated last week, or the JISC use cases. People are asking for use cases, people are asking for pointers to vocabularies and datasets. I agree that our current focus may be on something else now, but we must not drop that valuable material at the last moment!
>
> Best,
>
> Antoine
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/charter#deliverables
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Received on Friday, 18 February 2011 09:13:02 UTC