Comments on Visibility

[Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>]

For the three discovery patterns (simple, complex, mediated), consider expanding the phone book example.  

- You have simple discovery with a personal phone book where you keep contact information you have become aware of and feel is important.

- A project or business unit often has a contact sheet of project participants/unit members for a limited but nontrivial number of individuals -- akin to the complex discovery

- A large and more disconnected population (ranging from a large company to a city) refers to contact information in a central directory -- the mediated case

I think this also works for a service population and indicates that you may always have all three levels because they address different purposes.  Moreover, the benefits of the mediated approach "typically far outweigh[ing] the management issues" may depends on the number of services and the needs being addressed.

Also, when talking about metadata, there may be a standard vocabulary or a mediated interaction among known metadata vocabularies.

Ken

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Ken Laskey

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