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> Use Cases

Requirements for the DC-Ed Application Profile: Use Cases

The DC-Education Community's Application Profile Task Group gathered 49 use cases from around the world, and from every educational sector, describing what people and organisations want from this application profile, from September 2007 until February 2008. The use cases are listed below, and you can see a spreadsheet summarising them [WWW]here.

Submitted use cases:

Submitted usage scenarios:

Please contact [MAILTO]Lara Whitelaw if you have any questions or need help with any use case you wish to develop.

[WWW]Return to DC-Ed AP Page

What is a use case?

For our purposes, a use case is a short textual narrative describing your particular requirements of a system. These requirements are broken down into a series of steps taken to achieve them. For the DC-Ed AP, use cases will help capture the functionality you want the Profile to enable. These use cases may be as specific or general as necessary, e.g. you may like to put the case for including a specific element or vocabulary in the AP, or you may like to show how an educational application profile could be used to enhance access to a specific existing collection. Use cases may describe existing and future scenarios, e.g. work you already do, using existing metadata standards; or your own workarounds where there are gaps in existing standards; or requirements you would like to be able to meet but haven't yet.

What information about educational resources do you need to record and share? What educational metadata does your organisation use already, and what does it need for the future? Are the existing metadata standards (e.g. IEEE LOM, Dublin Core, etc.) meeting your needs for describing educational resources, or for describing educational aspects of resources? The use case call is intended to help improve interoperability and make your requirements known:

The Dublin Core Education Community looked for use cases to gather requirements for a Dublin Core Education Application Profile. The deadline for submitting use cases was 22nd February 2008. This Application Profile will be modular in nature, only defining properties or elements of relevance to educational use of resources. It will plug into other application profiles. It will use some existing Dublin Core elements, and may propose new ones and/or reuse elements from other metadata standards such as the IEEE LOM. It will also recommend vocabularies for use with some of these properties.

The use case call has been an opportunity for you to tell us your requirements, so that the DC-Education Application Profile reflects and meets your needs. We have encouraged the submission of use case, in the from of for short textual narratives describing how you would like educational metadata to support your work.

The Dublin Core Education Application Profile is intended to be light-weight and simple to use. The Dublin Core Education AP Task Group is working closely with the IEEE LOM and ISO Metadata for Learning Resources communities to ensure there is a level of harmony between the metadata schemas and that effort is not duplicated. The DC-Ed AP Task Group has been gathering use cases to be submitted by the end of February 2008, to enable the drafting of the application profile in time for the Dublin Core conference in Berlin, Germany September 2008.

Templates for writing use cases can be downloaded here: DC-Ed_Use_Case_Template.doc and DC-Ed_Scenario_Template.doc

Use Case Terminology
Use Case A use case expresses the behavioural portion of a contract between stakeholders of a system. It describes the system’s behaviour and interactions under various conditions as it responds to a request on behalf of one of the stakeholders - the primary actor, showing how the primary actors goal gets delivered or fails. The use case gathers the scenarios related to the primary actor’s goal
Actor Something with behaviour. It might be a computer system, person, organisation or combination of these.
Primary Actor A stakeholder who requests that the system deliver a goal. Typically but not always the primary actor initiates the interaction with the system. The primary actor may have an intermediary initiate the interaction or may have the interaction triggered automatically on some event
Scenario A sequence of actions and interactions that occurs under certain conditions
Extensions Below the main success scenario, for every point where the behaviour can branch because of a particular condition, write down the condition. As an option, additional information can be provided about how the exception could be handled.

If you would like to know more about use cases and how to write them, you may want to read the following:

Please contact [MAILTO]Lara Whitelaw if you have any questions or need help with any use case you wish to develop.

[WWW]Return to DC-Ed AP Page