General Use Case Information

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Actors

Human Actors

System Administrator
Overall system administrator. Responsible for system-level software and hardware maintenance
Registry Manager
Person (or persons) responsible for the administrative tasks involved in the management of a registry
Vocabulary Editor/Reviewer
Person (or persons) responsible for editorial functions related to submitted vocabularies
Visitor
Anyone viewing or browsing the site who is not logged in, including registered Maintainers who have not yet logged in.
Registered User
A Vistor who has registered himself/herself for the purpose of registering an organization or vocabulary. A Registered User may assume an additional role (Maintainer, Organization Contact) while registering an organization or vocabulary.
Organization Contact
Person acting on behalf of an organization, to whom notifications to the Organization may be sent.
Maintainer
Person responsible for maintaining a vocabulary

Non-human Actors

Registry
The registry software, including user interfaces, processing systems, and services
Service
An interface intended to be used by machines that provides data in response to a request
Service Consumer
Machine requesting data from a service
Organization
Basically a term for for group of persons or an educational or business unit rather than an individual. For instance, an NSDL Project is an organization. In the current context the organization is also the entity responsible for the vocabulary. Vocabularies are associated with an Organization and maintained by a Maintainer who is authorized by the Organization. (Policy question?)

Terms

Vocabulary
[Merriam-Webster] "a list or collection of words or of words and phrases usually alphabetically arranged and explained or defined" ; [In the context of this project] "A set of concepts, represented by words and word relationships, presented in a structured manner." [NOTE: the DC Abstract Model uses the term Vocabulary Encoding Scheme, defined as "A vocabulary encoding scheme is a class that indicates that the value of a property is taken from a controlled vocabulary (or concept-space), such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings"]
Hosted Vocabulary
A vocabulary whose canonical (official) version resides, or is "hosted" in the Registry.
Non-hosted Vocabulary
A vocabulary that is published (exposed) through the Registry but that is created and maintained by its promulgating agency in a separate registry or as a Web-addressable file in its own namespace.
Terms
DC Abstract Model "The generic name for a property (i.e. element or element refinement), vocabulary encoding scheme, syntax encoding scheme or concept taken from a controlled vocabulary (concept space)"
Tokens
[from Wikipedia] "In computer science, specifically lexical analysis, a token is usually a word or an atomic element within a string. Tokenizing is systematically replacing portions of a string by such corresponding token"
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
[from SKOS Home Page] "SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries and other types of controlled vocabulary within the framework of the semantic web"
PURLs
[from the OCLC PURL Home page] "A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client can then complete the URL transaction in the normal fashion. In Web parlance, this is a standard HTTP redirect"

Vocabulary and Member Term States (Statuses?)

  • Private The state of a vocabulary or a vocabulary term that has been created in the registry by a Maintainer but that has not been submitted to the Registry Manager (or delegate)Diane: might we consider "draft" instead? Private has connotations that we might not want, suggesting reservation of rights or something withheld.
  • Submitted The state of a vocabulary or a vocabulary term that has been submitted by a Maintainer and is under review by the Regestry Manager (or delegate)
  • Published The state of a vocabulary or a vocabulary term that has been exposed to external human and machine agents through the registry
  • Deprecated The state of a vocabulary or vocabulary terms the use of which is no longer advised, most often because it has been withdrawn or replaced.

Policies

WARNING - assumption alert!! Many of the use cases below make assumptions about yet-to-be-decided policies (as of 9/2005)

  • Vocabularies must be associated with an Organization that acts as the Entity responsible for the Vocabulary
  • Vocabulary Maintainers are individuals and they must be associated with an Organization in order to maintain an Organization's Vocabularies
  • A Maintainer may be associated with more than one Organization and more than one Vocabulary
  • Maintainers assertion of association with an Organization will be assumed to be valid unless the organization, after notification of a vocabulary registration, questions the association. In other words, Organizations don't need to specifically authorize individual Maintainers to maintain a specific Vocabulary, but reasonable measures will be taken to assure the Registry against fraud and error.
  • Organizations must be able to be associated with an internet domain that will form the root of individual Vocabulary namespaces, or agree to allow the registry domain to substitute.