[Esip-preserve] A Wiki Page on Use Cases - II

[Bruce Barkstrom]

I've gone ahead and added a Wiki page to the Preservation Cluster's
area at ESIP dealing with a suggestion on use cases - and a rough
categorization for them.  The intent of this categorization is NOT to
replicate a complete metadata structure, but simply to provide some
very preliminary way of trying to find out if we have a reasonably
complete collection of cases that cover most of the kinds of collections
we might encounter "in the wild."  I had provided a preliminary page
on Friday, and have now added a substantial amount of additional
material.

As we've noted in the past, Earth science data comes from a lot of
communities with very different kinds of production paradigms.  Some
communities have collections of specimens; others have collections
of photographic images; still others have collections of digital files
created from operational data streams.  We need to make sure that
our discussions don't come from only one community, since that
would almost certainly distort the kinds of services needed and the
kinds of citations people would make of them.

The core of the suggestion in this page is to record a rough categorization
of use cases in two tab-delimited text files:
- one file containing a ROUGH categorization of Earth science data collections
- one file containing a ROUGH categorization of "citation use cases" - meaning
one or two paragraph "stories" that describe how one or more collections were
(or could be) cited.

>From my perspective, it's much to early to ask for precise definitions
of the various fields in these categorizations.  It is probably more sensible
to regard these as preliminary summaries of field experiments or anthropological
expeditions that are intended to produce raw material for more considered
and careful definitional categorization at a later time.

As usual, the ideas in this e-mail and in the Web pages are preliminary and
should be edited or restructured as needed.

Bruce b.