Re: Requirements document

Below you find some remarks and questions that are probably only
useful for work on the next version of the requirements document.

The "global, logical structure" of the document goes from use cases and
design goals to requirements and objectives.
It is interesting to look at the list of use cases and design goals and to 
see
how often they are mentioned as justification for a requirement or 
objective,
respectively.  In the table below these two numbers are mentioned 
between brackets:

Use cases:
Web portals (3 requirements; 0 objectives)
Multimedia collections (1; 2)
Corporate Web site management (0; 0)
Design documentation (1; 2)
Intelligent agents (1; 2)
Ubiquitous computing (1; 6)

Design goals:
Shared ontologies (10; 2)
Ontology evolution (1; 0)
Ontology interoperability (3; 4)
Inconsistency detection (0; 0)
Balance of expressiveness and scalability (0; 0)
Ease of use (0; 0)
XML syntax (0; 0)
Internationalization (3; 1)

So Inconsistency detection, Balance of expressiveness and scalability,
Ease of use, and XML syntax, which are stated as design goals, do not
appear explicitly as motivation for a requirement or objective.
This is no problem because, as the document says just before Section 1.1:
The specification will be developed largely by looking at 
the design goals and requirements that are contained in this document, ...

In a future version of the document we could improve clarity and 
uniformity 
by using the design goals only for justification and by including several 
additional 
requirements to deal with the design goals with only zeros in the above 
table.

Note that there is one use case, Corporate Web site mgt,
without any explicitly mentioned role as justification for a requirement 
or objective.
So formally, this use case could be deleted from the document!
However, it seems to be better to find a requirement or objective
where it is relevant.

Herman