Comments on the metamodel slide deck

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

I've reviewed the metamodel slide deck. The main issue I have with it is that slides are not a narrative to be read. They merely give visual emphasis to the actual narrative that you speak. There's a reason they're called bullets (aside from the resemblance to bullet holes). Bang! Bang! Bang! They're like brief notes that the listener might jot down as reminders of your main points. The content must be terse and well spaced. Wall to wall gray matter boggles the eye and puts the viewer to sleep--and tempts you to read every word, the cardinal sin of powerpoint. I've done a rewrite just to demonstrate what I mean (attached). In some cases I split a slide in two. I'm sure you can do a better job of it than I.

 

Do we want an overview TOC up front? Give folks an idea where we're going? Judging from the slides with just a title and no conntent, the sections seem to be:

 

Introduction 
Is this the best title? I added some bullets as a kind of TOC for this section.

 

Enterprise Content Management
Slides 17 through 21. This section would benefit from a couple of examples of the tremendous redundancy that we saw in that other slide deck. Can we use some of those slides?

 

Modeling Enterprise Content
The bulk of the slides. These are laid out well, terse and very readable, and the repeated common structure helps. For slide 27, I made a graphic so I could change the font color for legibility (black and blue not good for eyes). For slides 57-62, I've added thumbnail excerpts from the "abstract types" slide image, one for each abstract type, to recapitulate the vertical relationships. I didn't include topic at the top, I could redo them if desired, but there is a stub vertical line ascending, maybe that's enough as a talking point.

 

Business Content Specializations
Need some content here.

 

Aggregated Business Documents
Does this belong in a presentation about the metamodel, or is that a separate slide deck?

 

Metadata Requirements
Just lists 5 categories of metadata. Is there more to say?

BusDocsMetamodel_BN.zip