[infod-wg] magazine scenarios and infod

[Chris Kantarjiev]

During GGF12, we had a number of hallway conversations with people who just 
didn't "get it" as we tried to explain INFOD scenarios. To try to get our head 
around the components of INFOD in a "real world" scenario, it has been suggested 
to use magazines as an example. I wrote up most of this at that time, but didn't 
really circulate it very widely. As we're getting ready for the F2F and working 
on making our existing documents more accessible, I thought it might be useful 
to revisit it.

Consider:

A magazine editor draws on a collection of news items and collects them together
into an edition, which is then distributed to subscribers and others. INFOD's
various publication models can be shown by:

"spam" - a magazine publisher decides to send out complimentary issues to a list
of people based on some criteria. This is an explicit publish, without subscription.

"classical pub/sub" - the magazine publisher sends issues to the people that
have paid a subscription. Is this implicit publication? This might be considered
a degenerate form of on-demand publication, in that the consumer has created a
subscription, but it is to a publication that already exists (pre-exists).

"customized news" - the magazine publisher may also make the pool of news items
available for custom notification - consumers may create subscriptions for
certain areas of interest (e.g., sports news, with extra detail on Formula 1
race results). This is implicit, or on-demand, publishing.

The consumer may also wish to exercise some control over delivery. In the normal
magazine subscription case, this can be seen as a mechanism for suspending
delivery - either via the Post Office or the publisher directly (say, for a
vacation period). For the customized news case, the subscriber may wish to
receive breaking news via SMS, but not from 9pm till 9am. INFOD uses the term
"propogation" to describe this aspect of delivery.

"brokering" can be thought of as magazine sales at a kiosk - the magazine 
publisher sends issues to a kiosk and consumers take delivery there as they 
desire. This is not as compelling an example (at least to me), since it 
conflates the areas of publishing and delivery.

INFOD does not address the selection of news items to be made available to the
magazine editor. This *could* be expressed in a security framework - that some
events are stored in the collection but are not generally visible.

Does this help? Can we make better use of it, at least as introductory material?

chris