History System Use Cases (was: Use of www-rdf-dspace for comments blah-blah)

Mick writes:

> Rather than risk severe scope creep for the work
> underway, I suggest that we view these problems as
> a basis for Use Case(s) based upon the History System.
> Perhaps we should update the History System Use Case
> in the SIMILE Research Drivers document [SRD] to
> reflect this?

This is a great point. The "Drivers" document anticipates that the History
System will enable the following:

"...To be trusted, such a steward must be able to retain and provide
non-repudiatable audit trails of how content and metadata has been altered,
migrated, transformed, or augmented over time (``Proof of transformation
path``, or ``data provenance``). The steward may need to undo and/or redo part
of the transformation path based on errors discovered, improved tools, etc.
Queries on the information regarding transformation paths across the corpus
can be expected in the process of optimally maintaining and preserving the
corpus..."

This requires a richness of property declaration/collection surrounding
curatorial events that (I don't believe) is currently captured in Jason's
document. Yes, all of the collection-level stuff is in there, but there needs
to be models for a set of activities AT A HIGHER LEVEL than the current
repository-level, pushing-bits-around actions.

I realize that the statement of work says that "...(t)he intent is not to
extend or enhance the amount of information included in the output from the
History System, nor to create a more complex model..." but essentially to make
the information it produces more usable. But I fail to see how the History
system can do its job documenting "...events of archival interest (that) occur
within the system (for example, when a community is created, an item's
instance metadata is edited, or the members of a collection are modified)..."
if a richer halo of metadata around those events is not created.

That is a hypothesis. It can be tested by examining use cases that demonstrate
collection of metadata surrounding curatorial activities, and esp. subsequent
use of that metadata to guide e.g. rollback, etc. I'm esp. interested in
retrieving explicit information that helps humans inthe second case understand
e.g. WHY something was done, rather than than the implied meaning of e.g.
transformations, migrations, etc.

John

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 14:59:15 UTC