User Requirements Gathering

This topic covers the user requirements process rather than system requirements (for these, see InfrastructureDev)

Some comments arising from Jan17thMeeting

An simple example of putting people into the workflow rather than at the ends might be:

Given a collection of 1000 samples and 1000 volunteers.
Allocate each volunteer 10 samples.
Get the volunteer to mark each sample as happy or sad.
From the volunteers' marks assign "happiness" on a scale of 1 - 10

OK, a stupidly simple example but I'm sure you can think of others - e.g getting the community to judge the significance of the outputs of a feature extraction algorithm, indeed comparing the judgement across different communities (musicologists versus enthusiasts) etc. The vision I have for OMRAS2 is that it should provide an collaborative framework for setting up such workflows.

I was a little concerned that talk of the requirements gathering process suggested that this was outside the OMRAS framework. In the vision (and I think it worth articulating the vision as well as what we can practically achieve), I would see requirements gathering (and iteration) as part of the framework -

e.g. a musicologist might indicate to the framework they need a tool to do x ultimately some semantic web/grid magic happens to identify a suitable existing tool however, when this doesn't return anything the requirement is kept on the system someone may pick up on this requirement and suggest a suitable tool (i.e. people provide a role within the knowledge management activity as much as clever technology).

A MSc student (or even PhD, or PIs etc.) may look through the requirements for suitable projects to work on.

-- MatthewDovey - 18 Jan 2007

Re: Some comments arising from Jan17thMeeting

As I see it, the plan for requirements gathering is currently "in-line" with the workflow in WP3; namely dialogue with partners about what problems and issues they currently face as well as evaluation of the systems we build. I really like your idea that integrating requirements gathering in the core system framework (perhaps as part of the user interface?) will give us a more direct work flow and really put users at the core.

-- MichaelCasey - 18 Jan 2007