[infod-wg] magazine scenarios and infod

[Steve Fisher]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 11:28:42PM -0000, Chris Kantarjiev wrote:
> 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.

I think it should go into the Use Case document - probably as the
first one as it is a very accessible example and yet is quite wide
ranging.

Susan and I have unfortunately not made much progress of late. I feel
that we should express things with  WS-N terminology and indicate
clearly where we are going beyond this. I hope we can make some
progress on this before the F2F!

Steve

> 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