User Requirements Gathering

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

Some comments arising from ?

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 ?

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