Document Engineering and Information Architecture (INFO 243)

Assignment 4: Requirements and Inventory

Author(s):
Bob Glushko
glushko@ischool.berkeley.edu

Course: Document Engineering and Information Architecture (INFO 243)
Date: 7 March 2007
Title: Assignment 4: Requirements and Inventory
This assignment gives you practice at identifying and prioritizing requirements and in locating documents or other information sources

This asssignment is due by midnight on Friday 16 March. Turn in your work (with your name in both the filename and in the content) by uploading a file on the course syllabus page.

As many of you know -- or will soon know -- firsthand, if you don't want to pay nonresident tuition you have to submit a Statement of Legal Residency to the university.

The form is at http://registrar.berkeley.edu/elecforms/SLRReadm.pdf

http://registrar.berkeley.edu/Residency/legalinfo.html describes the tedious and bureaucratic process.

The process requires students to submit many kinds of documents as evidence that you are a legal resident of California. While the SLR itself is an electronic document that aggregates information from numerous other documents, all of these documents must be submitted on paper.

The university says that "all relevant indications will be considered in determining your classification," or as a lawyer would say, the presence or absence of any particular document is not dispositive. Your best strategy is just to keep piling on documents until the balance of evidence shifts in your favor. Because of the paper-intensive nature of the process, there are piles of applications stacked somewhere in some corner of the university and it can take weeks or even months to evaluate an application, during which time the poor student may be in limbo with loans tied up and other uncertainties.

We can imagine a better way in which all of the information to establish residency can be submitted and managed in digital form. So in this assignment you're asked to think through some of the requirements and information sources with the goal of automating more of the process. In particular, we imagine that after the initial form and documents are submitted, any interactions between the university and the student are conducted by email. If the university has a question about a document, it would direct a student to a web form that must be further annotated or augmented with new information or documents. The email might refer to any of the submitted documents that are stored in a content management system after they are uploaded.

Section 8.1.3 of the Glushko & McGrath book, which was briefly discussed in the March 5 lecture, lists 11 "generic requirements" for Document Engineering efforts. Taking the perspective of the university, choose one of these 11 requirements as the most important one and rate the priority of the other 10 requirements as "high," "medium," or "low." Spread out your ratings so that no more than three of them are "high" and at least two of them are "low." If you can come up with a "theory" or "theme" that helps you rate the priority of the requirements, be sure to include that (for example, you might say "because the university is primarily driven by X, anything that doesn't directly and immediately contribute to X can't be that important.")

Repeat Activity 1, this time taking the perspective of the student attempting to establish residency. Follow the same rules about the distribution of your ratings. As in Activity 1, if you can come up with a "theory" or "theme" that helps you rate the priority of the requirements, be sure to include that (for example, you might say "because the student mostly cares about Y, anything that doesn't directly and immediately contribute to Y can't be that important.")

It would be easier for you to think through Activities 1 and 2 and easiest for us to review them if you created a table like this one.

List some document types and information sources that you would want to analyze to understand the residency process and to design an automated system. If we were doing this project for real, we would then analyze them to identify the semantic components or data elements that establish residency. Some of these documents are implied by the composition structure in the SLR or listed in the "legalinfo" document mentioned earlier (You don't need to include the Statement of Legal Residence itself; we already know it is the most important document that suggests or aggregates the other documents).

Since not everything is equally important, rate each document or information source as "essential", "important," and "nice to analyze." As in Activities 2 and 3, don't rate everything with the same priority.

As you extract these documents or information sources from the SLR and from the legalinfo documents, you will probably be identifying specific information components that are the most relevant content for the SLR. Be sure to note these because in a sense you're creating a detailed "scavenger hunt" list of things to look for in the inventory.

For each type of document in your list for Activity 3, write a short definition and list any synonyms or aliases that might be used for the document type.

It would be easier for you to think through Activities 3 and 4 and easiest for us to review them if you created a table like this one.