Re: Draft report and use cases

On 18 Feb 2011, at 09:04, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> 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].

I like the idea of separate, more-or-less independent documents. This addresses the tension between producing a readable report and documenting our process. Meanwhile, it allows us to make full use of what we have gathered, while making it obvious that we have different products, which may be relevant to different audiences.

I think the appendix should be
- integral to the report (in terms of content)
- in a separate section at the end (in terms of location)

I think a reading guide could be a good appendix -- then the report would be "complete" in the sense that it lists everything we have produced. Then the related documents (use case clusters, but also the vocabularies, and the CKAN datasets) could be accessible from the report but not "integral" to and "part of" it.

> 
> 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.

I agree! :)

> 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.

Use cases will certainly be valuable for others! And vocabularies and datasets are essential.

At the same time, I understand (and agree with) Karen's point: the largest part of library data is held in catalogs, and we must emphasize that as one major application area. With RDA on the doorstep, this is a good moment to attend to the data, and argue for Linked Data.

I think that the multiplicity of use cases doesn't detract from the importance of this one; but I suspect that our different ideas about what to do with use cases (and how much time to spend on them) are due to differences on that point -- whether the largest uses may get lost in the multiplicity and variation.

-Jodi

> 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 12:41:19 UTC