[RUS-WG] Ideas for the RUS specification

[Joshua Green]

Hi Gilbert, everybody,

I am glad to hear my analysis of the current RUS draft was helpful.  I
recently read through it and must apologise for the many grammatical
mistakes I found there.  Apparently my proof reading isn't up to much!

I strongly agree with factoring out of publishing of usage record
information into a another spec .  The team I work with are developing
an accounting system that is expected to be RUS compliant.  When we
consulted our stakeholders (namely NGS and various campus grids in the
UK) and any possible interested users we could think of they were all
very keen on us implementing the RUS.  However, after we questioned
them in more detail we discovered they didn't really know what the RUS
was.  When they said 'RUS' they really meant a 'usage record
publishing specification'.  They assumed this is what RUS was.  Of
course, they aren't wrong but they didn't seem to be very interested
in other aspects of the RUS.

These groups would greatly benefit from a 'Usage Record Publishing
Interface'.  Such a standard could get finished off and finalised
quite quickly which would be very helpful as this is the main feature
users are crying out for right now.  The other aspects of the RUS,
such as usage record and history querying may be useful to some, but
their interface is a lot harder to get right, will take longer to tune
and the target audience less certain.  While I can imagine there are
such groups out there who would like such features, we have not
encountered them yet in our requirements gathering exercises (apart
from the odd user saying 'ooh that would be nice, we might consider
using that if the product you gave us had that').


Hope this was helpful.

Joshua Green
EPCC Applications Developer