[xtm-wg] XTM-UCS: Summary of UCS activities at the meeting.

["Bryan Thompson" <bryan-pop@cog-tech.com>]

All,

Here is a summary of the activities of the XTM-UCS (Use Cases 
Subgroup) at the Montreal XTM meeting.  This message is information 
only.  We will be sending out a brief survey in the next day or so to 
solicit input from the XTM community.
 
Some possible use cases for XTM.  This is from the piece of paper that 
we passed around at the Montreal XTM meeting.  In my opinion most of 
these are technologies, not applications and not markets.  We should 
probably develop a description of what a use case is, and is not, so 
that we know how to elicit them and when we have them.

-	Fuzzy, probabilistic and cognitive models.
-	Collaboration, communities, and workflow.
-	Inferencing, fuzzy / linguistic variables, multiple
        ontologies, simultaneous metadata, process negotiation.
-	New media publishing and other electronic publishing.
-	Ontology cross-walking (the W3C semantic web effort and
        SHOE are also in this space).
-	Indexing, index merging and interchange.
-	Annotation and metadata.
-	Search interface enhancement.
-	Software architectures, system architectures.
-	Process negotiation between agents & Contracts.
-	KnoW - the Knowledge on the Web initiative.
-	RDF - Dublin Core, DMOZ (the Open Directory project).
-	Software for organizing and interchanging thoughts.
-	Parts catalog, electronic catalogs and shopping (B2B,
        B2C space).
-	Lifelong pedagogy (education).
-	Cyc (knowledge base of common sense reasoning).
-	Wordnet (knowledge base of word sense meanings and lexical
        syntactic structure).
-	Geographic data.
-	Multi-dimensional databases.
-	Interchange for network databases (Peter Jones pointed out
        that topic maps and network databases can be mapped onto one
        another.  Network, relational, and hierarchical are three
        distinct database models.)

Features or requirements that may be required by the above "use 
cases", and which appear to go beyond the ISO specification.

-	XML interoperability.
-	Weights for fuzzy systems (which might be represented as
        required attributes on Occurrence elements for certain
        XTM applications).
-	Robust and fine-grained out-of-line anchors for annotations.
-	Mechanisms for specifying topology constraints on XTM
        documents.
 

Here is the list of tasks that we discussed (as they emerged from some 
in-the-meeting editing by Peter, Andrius and myself):

A: Gather use cases
-	Poll the XTM meeting for use cases (done).
-	Define what we mean by a "Use Case".
-	Poll the XTM mailing list for use cases (We are drafting
        a survey now).
-	Develop broad categories and underlying dimensions for
        those use cases.
-	Summarize and publish the results to the list.

B: Identify representative use cases.
-	Recommend several uses cases to the authoring group.  I would
        like to do this by the London meeting date, if not before.
        The London meeting is Friday, Oct., 13th-15th, 2000.

C: Derive additional requirements for XTM based on the use
   cases selected by the authoring group.
-	Analyze the logical structure of the use cases (I would like
        to do much of this work at the London meeting itself).
-	Recommend additional XTM requirements to the authoring group.

D: Evaluate XTM against requirements
-	Provide a means for ourselves and others to evaluate XTM
        as a solution for any given use case.
-	The Conceptual Modeling group will validate the concept
        model against the requirements.
-	The Interchange group will validate the interchange model
        against the requirements.

E: Contribute prose and use case examples to the XTM specification.

Resume your life already in progress :)

Bryan Thompson
bryan@cog-tech.com




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