[esip-semantictech] Ontology Portal Use Cases

[Beth Huffer]

Good morning, everyone,

Here's what's happening with the ontology portal use case development 
effort. Mike Huhn and I have fleshed out some of the use cases that were 
posted on the semantic web wiki here 
<https://esipfed.github.io/stc/UseCases/STCUseCasesAndRequirements.html#UseCases>. 
I also took a look (admittedly cursory) at the use cases John Graybeal 
linked to in an earlier email. In my estimation, what we have at this 
point is essentially a set of 4 general use cases for the ontology 
portal, as follows:

1. Supporting ontology creators/editors in uploading, editing and 
versioning of ontologies (Line's 4.3 combined with Ruth's 4.8 for a 
single "Create and maintain ontologies in the portal" use case.)

2. Providing semantic support for external applications via an api, 
which is represented by Lewis' search engine use case (4.1); in looking 
through the use cases John Graybeal linked to, a lot of them are of this 
type. I don't think we need to evaluate the functionality of the 
external applications, but rather just the question of whether or not 
the portal can provide the term-matching, etc. that such applications 
would need.

3. Support for portal end-users who want to browse ontologies and find 
vocabulary.

4. Support for portal end-users who want to annotate their text documents.

In my opinion, the other use cases are just variations on one of these 4 
cases, and are better treated as functional requirements for one or more 
of the 4 general use cases. Of course, I'm certainly willing to be 
talked out of that view, if others disagree. I welcome your input on this.

Assuming that my assessment is more or less accurate, then our 4 use 
cases are

4.1 Use of Semantics within Search Engines;

4.2 Browsing a Portal for a Relevant Ontology

4.3 (combined with 4.8) Publishing and Maintaining Ontologies

4.5 Annotating Text

Use cases 4.4 and 4.7 are being treated as functional requirements, 
because the 4 general use cases all depend on these capabilities. I've 
tabled 4.6 for the moment, so we can evaluate the basics first. The 
fleshed out version of the above 4 use cases are available on the wiki.

I've created a spreadsheet to map use cases to requirements, since there 
is some overlap and I'm hoping this might provide a way for us to 
prioritize the functionality into must-haves and nice-to-haves and give 
the evaluators some material to work from. Also with this in mind, I 
created a second table for dependencies among the use cases. I.e., all 
of the use cases depend, for instance, on the portal being able to 
support ontology creation and editing. Most of them depend on 
search/browse support, etc. So it seems clear that those two use cases 
are super critical. The spreadsheet is attached.

If you could take a look at the fleshed out use cases on the wiki, and 
the requirements/dependencies and provide any feedback you might have, 
we would be most grateful. If there are other use cases that feel should 
be included, please let us know. Thanks very much.

Beth



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