Guidelines for URW3 use case discussions

Dear URW3 participants,

One of the questions during our last telecon was how our discussion  
of use cases would contribute to the final XG report.  A draft  
outline of the report is included as a discussion item for the 11  
July telecon, and you should be receiving that shortly.  Consistent  
with that, I would like to propose the following as guidelines for  
our use case discussions.

What we want to establish from each use case discussion
   1. What important aspects of uncertainty does this use case  
illustrate that are relevant to reasoning on the scale of the Web?
   2. WITHOUT GETTING INTO TECHNICAL DETAILS, what methodologies are  
currently being applied to this type of uncertainty problem?
   3. What is missing in current Web standards that is necessary to  
support these methodologies?
   4. What needs to be standardized to enable these methodologies on  
scale of the Web?  Can a Tower of Babel, in which there is a  
proliferation of special-purpose standards, be avoided? A special  
purpose standard for a particular methodology can be standardized  
within the relevant community. Is there something appropriately  
general for W3C that should be standardized?

The list is in order of what information we need to identity, and the  
order is important.

For item 1, we should use the ontology we are developing as a common  
basis for categorizing the use case uncertainty attributes.  A use  
case discussion should be in the context of the existing ontology or  
should suggest changes to the ontology.  We can introduce suggested  
changes during the use case discussion, but detailed exchanges should  
be done between telecons using email and the wiki.  We can schedule  
telecon discussion when ideas have been fleshed out and we are ready  
to make decisions.

The charter is written to do item 1 before we compile the list for  
item 2 and reach conclusions based on items 3 and 4.  It may be  
unrealistic and limiting to our overall goals if we were to rigidly  
enforce this separation, but it is also too easy to just jump to  
these (especially item 2) because that is foremost in the research of  
many of our members.  Let's make sure we understand the use case  
before we analyze its solution.

Feel free to comment and suggest changes to the guidelines.

Ken

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------
Ken Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305     phone:  703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive                        fax:        703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508