[seek-kr-sms] SMS Partial Design -- Request for Comments

[Shawn Bowers]

Hi everyone,

I checked in some additions to the SEEK SMS design docs I've been 
working on.

In particular, this document contains all of the most recent stuff that 
is finished as a draft.

Here it is:

http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/kr-sms/docs/SMS-API-Design-Apr01-2004.pdf

I would really like your feedback on this (somewhat preliminary) design, 
  before moving on to additional design work and prototyping (which I 
have already started, but anyway), etc.

The design consists of a very high-level view of the services provided 
by KR/SMS.  Then, it goes over four informal use-cases: (1) defining 
semantic registration mappings, (2) semantic dataset discovery (of which 
there is a prototype, but more on that later), (3) semantic actor 
classification (an alternative or supplement to the current Kepler 
proposal -- the idea being that the KR/SMS component leverages 
ontologies for dynamically constructing relevant Kepler file folders for 
browsing actors), and (4) structural data transformation for actor 
composition.  [Note that these use cases are just a preliminary set of 
use cases for KR/SMS -- to get things going for development and to 
appease our project manager :-) ]

The first two use cases have some detail: The registration use case 
provides a notional interface for easy semantic attachment and sequence 
diagrams; The dataset discovery shows an example query (with a similar 
interface as for registration) and a corresponding sequence diagram. The 
last two use cases are not "filled" out in this style. Note that there 
are no "words" for the slides (unless you count the 1000 words 
associated with each picture).

I would really appreciate your feedback, comments, etc. on this stuff.

Thanks,
Shawn