ScenariWiki

This section presents a fictional use-case that describes fragmented authoring in a collaborative environment. Although the use-case is fictional, it has been based on a real-life usecase and has been presented and discussed with domain experts, notably during project meetings. Based on this use-case we derive requirements for the functionality of collaborative fragmented authoring system.

Fast is a large fastfood chain having restaurants all over the world. Alan, Brigit and Chris are working together on the sixth version of the Fast product manual. The Fast manual contains all the recipes and procedures to be followed by the employees to ensure a quality product that is produced in the most efficient way. The manual is organized by product, an entry typically consists of a recipe and associated procedures. Alan and Chris are domain specialists. Alan is a culinary chef and focuses on the recipes, while Chris is responsible that hygienic regulations are applied properly and therefore is responsible for the to be followed procedures. Brigit manages the document as a whole, she writes clearly and often clarifies contributions by Alan and Chris to make them accessible for the Fast employees.

There are often parts in recipes or procedure that are common for several instances. As a result, a typical workflow adopted by the authors is to start from an existing product and make the necessary adjustments in the recipe and procedures. Also, older recipes or procedures that at some point were outdated and removed from the manual may become relevant again at a later stage. The authors typically have a good overview of the current and prior recipes and procedures. However, because of the the frequent updates it sometimes takes time to find the appropriate fragment.

For novel products it happens that Alan and Chris both reuse an entry for an existing product, but the reused entries are not necessarily the same. This poses a problem for Birgit, who needs to merge both contributions, she does not always know what text to use in case the contributions conflict. In such case she likes to get an overview of both contribution that identifies where exactly the differences are. As the authors have a tendency to reuse contributions, chances are that both contributions have a common root, which would simplify the merge.

Reuse of fragments is a popular feature. However, Brigit is a bit hesitant to allow the marketing department to access the text for the manual as it happened that they accidentally changed an entry. In contrast, it also happened that they find an error, or improve an entry by rephrasing part of the text. What Birgit would like to prevent the accidents, but still benefit from the occasional contribution.

The basic structure and content of the quick manual is quite stable. However, product, recipes and procedures change regularly due to different demands and hygienic regulations. This requires minor adaptations in the text, hence the annual update of the manual. To ensure that all employees are aware of the changes an appendix with all the changes compared to the prior version of the document is added. Although novel employees consult the manual, more experienced employees typically just consult the appendix. It is therefore important to keep track of the changes made to the document.

It happens that the marketing department wishes to reuses parts of the manual, but they have difficulties finding their way in the repository. To help them, Brigit provides short annotations of texts she thinks could be of interest to be reused. She sometimes provides an informal summary with keywords for an elaborate text that can speeds up the process to decide whether the document is relevant. On occasions she also annotates a text on a more rhetorical level. For example, when a text provides an argument against the critic of eating unhealthy food.

After six years of collaborative work on the manual, the acquired texts and knowledge is considerably more than the final printed version of the manual. The Fast management acknowledges this and is eager to conserve all this. They clearly remember the chaos, six years ago when they replaced Word by Scenari 1.0. They like to prevent this as much as possible by future upgrades, such as Scenari 5, which was recently released.