Category Archives: Case Studies

Tiffany’s Assignment 10

Tiffany Barkley

INFO 202 Assignment 10

OVERVIEW

This case study discusses the organizational principles and processes behind a computational system built by a start-up to collect traffic speed data and provide real-time routing and trip time estimates to users as part of a new mobile application

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING ORGANIZED?

The resources in this scenario are the data points that are collected by the system and turned into the travel guidance viewed by the end-user. The foundational system resource is traffic speed data. During the resource selection process, the company needs to decide the types of data it will collect and from where they will be acquired. Alternatives include collecting data from physical sensors maintained by the government for roadway operations (often free, but not always available), purchasing raw in-vehicle GPS data points from car companies and other vendors (costly), and collecting GPS data points from the company’s user base (free, but likely does not offer sufficient data points to produce good information

across an entire network). Making the decision of what types of data to collect and organize requires trade-off considerations of purchase cost, degree of autonomy from other organizations, accuracy of results, computation complexity, and scalability to other markets.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The resources are organized because they need to support the real-time interactions of a customer base that expects fast and accurate results. Underlying the transformation of the raw data into the processed trip time estimates is a highly organized database systems and set of computations, which are further described in the following section.  This organization is essential for quickly computing and updating information for the user. Beyond the real-time context, organizing the historical resource data has other benefits, like allowing the company to train its prediction models by comparing its trip time estimates with measured trip times computed from the data

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES BEING ORGANIZED?

This question depends on the number and different types of data resources chosen during resource selection. The organization of the resources all takes place in databases. It might make sense for the company to store all of the raw data that it collects in a separate table for each separate source, since each source will be received in a particular format. From there, the data may be organized into source-specific tables that store the results of massaging the data into speed in consistent units, along a specified set of network links sufficiently granular to support routing use cases. This data may be further processed and organized into the final data set that represents the fusion of all of the different collected data sources, generated with some weighting function for the accuracy of each source. While the mobile application may only interface with this final data set table, the other tables are critical for generating consistent results that can seamlessly handle various error conditions. For example, if the real-time data feeds go down, the final table can be populated with historical default values for each link, potentially representing average speeds for each time of day and day of week. The organization of the data at various levels of the processing chain allows for this to happen without the application having to know or care where the data comes from.

It is also important to consider how much the resource descriptions are being organized. With traffic data, it is most critical to capture and store where and when the data point was collected. How these resource descriptions are provided by the data source is highly variable, since there is no single, universally accepted standard for this domain. For example, location data can be received as a latitude/longitude pair in a number of different coordinate systems, a milemarker, or a reference to a ramp crossing. As such, it is critical to have a model that maps over the vocabulary used by each data source provider into the company’s model

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES BEING ORGANIZED?

The speed data resources are organized into the system in real-time, as they are collected. The data model and system architecture, however, would be defined by the company at the outset of the project, and continually refined as it is implemented and data begins to feed in. Given the rapid change in sensing technologies, it is likely that the company will have to revisit its database model and algorithms to accommodate new forms of data as their product matures. Another interesting question related to resource maintenance is how long the company should keep the data it collects. For the purposes of the mobile application, the value of each data point decreases over time.  However, the company has added value to the data by quality-controlling it and fusing disparate sources together, they may want to keep it and see if it can be of any value in future products or in a data sale to another organization. This especially makes sense given that storage costs are decreasing and cloud-based storage alternatives are abundant.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

Once the system is set-up, it is fully automated, meaning that the system takes care of all collection and organization. The development and maintenance of the system is done by company employees. Given the complexity of the system, this is a major undertaking which grows more challenging as the number of data sources and data points grow. At the outset, the system organizers needs to make decisions about the hardware needed to run the system (based on their estimates of how many data points will be collected and what needs to be done with them), structure the various database tables with a thorough understanding of inputs and outputs, and set up the feeds. On an ongoing basis, they need to maintain the system and add new sources/features as necessary.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

This case study considered traffic data to be the primary resource. As the system evolves, the company may want to fold in other resources helpful in prediction, such as data on traffic accidents, weather, and construction.

 

 

Knowledge Management Case Study – Ruchita

Overview 

Customer experience has become one of the key performance indicator for predicting success or early exit of a fledgling enterprise software company. When shifting the reference point from revenue-driven processes to user experience driven business, the business must rethink how to architect information flow within and outside the company for providing a seamless user experience.

The enterprise software startup considered for this case study was also facing several challenges that was starting to have negative impact on the end user experience. The software processes were ad-hoc, it was difficult to capture customer touch points, drive the open source developer community knowledge base, and was challenging to seamlessly weave the story for customer use cases around the product platform.

The customers experienced a broken software experience across various dimensions like deployment, customer interaction, training, and documentation.

What resources are being used? 

As a system designer, it was important to identify information components that had confounded information content. This includes the product documentation, blogs, training material, customer support tickets, and software tickets.The variability in information component implies a large and diverse set of resource descriptions causing categorization challenges for the entire set. In order to classify the diverse set of resources, common properties must be used to identify higher level of abstraction in order to balance precision tradeoff. We organized the resources based on broad categories like posts, product documentation, infographics, and customer tickets. However, even after categorizing the resources based on higher level of abstraction, there was another problem of separating the resources that pointed to the same instance. For example, knowledge base articles and product documentation sometimes referred to the same resource instance. Some resources were composite resources used by cross functional teams like customer support tickets were often used by the product marketing team to extract usecases. This situation caused ambiguity about the number of parts in the resource description decision. It was also important to separate the duality of the tangible embodiment of resources with inherent abstract information resource. For example, the resource distribution channel for example, print, ebook, blog posts, etc. also has the impact on how resources will be organized.

Why are the resources organized? 

The teams were facing vocabulary and interoperability issues because of the different document formats being used across various teams. The two teams for example, product documentation and training teams were not able to talk with each other due to absence of single sourcing and common interoperability issues. Additionally, there were several resources for multimedia like videos for training sessions that had separate organization issues. These multimedia resources would have to be classified based on the interactions that are qualitatively different than the other digital resources.

How much are the resources organized? 

Some resources must be organized based on the intrinsic static properties like category of the resource etc. Other resources must be organized based on the extrinsic dynamic properties like customer salesforce tickets and knowledge base articles must be organized simultaneously. Decisions about the organizations are based on the business goals of providing seamless customer interaction with the product. Because most of the content flow is intertwined in order to provide an end to end product experience it is imperative for the system designer to consider the information flow across different resource components. The XML based resources would follow DocBook standard for organization and interoperability between several platform. An example of these resources would be the documentation and blog posts.

When are the resources organized? 

The resources must be organized during creation.  Additionally, the resources would also be organized during the maintenance phase in order to maintain the archives based on various versions of the product platform. For the community driven content, (especially the JIRA tickets filed with the open source community) the organization would mostly happen during creation and triage phase.

Who does the organizing? 

The contributors, authors, curators, and the automated system are responsible for the content creation and organization. Some of the organization would be done during the creation based on the single sourcing publication solution that would be implemented. Additionally, the end users of the system will also do the organizing by tagging resources like customer tickets and use case based articles.

Other considerations 

This was an ambitious project considering the umbrella of components it covered. The most challenging part would be sweeping in the open source content because the company had no control over the form of the content received. Additionally, as the company grows the challenges with content production and localization are also inevitable. Currently, the support center and product documentation teams were able to talk with each other seamlessly, however product marketing and training teams could still not avail of the single source publishing pipeline because of legacy content. Merging these two teams would be another challenging aspect for the system designers.

“Bring Me The Night”

OVERVIEW

Dance teams are an exciting organizing system – they offer a fascinating form of entertainment that provides both the dancers and audience with a fun, uplifting experience. This case study will observe a specific dance that I had the privilege to be the male lead in this semester. Our dance set is called “Bring Me The Night”; we are part of the Dancewrx team, and we performed this dance in the Dancewrx Showcase in Berkeley this fall.

As a dancer, I had the opportunity to observe the entire Dancewrx team on different levels. On one level, I saw how all of the different dances (or sets) come together to form a showcase for the audience. I also observed on a much closer and detailed level how a specific dance, like “Bring Me The Night”, prepared for a showcase. As an organizing system, I discovered that the richest organizing principles and the interactions that they support are found at this lower level of abstraction.

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING USED?

There are three physical resources that can be found in this organizing system: dancers, props, and location. The dancers are the primary resources. They are by far the most important elements of a dance set for obvious reasons (without dancers, there would be no set), but also because the dancers contain resource descriptions (as will be mentioned later) that drive the organizing principles.

Props are also sometimes used in order to enhance or add an exciting element to the set. For example, in another set that I participated in, the men wore pre-ripped tank tops and at one point stripped them off and threw it into the crowd, much to the thrill and delight of the audience. For “Bring Me The Night”, however, there were no props used. Note that there is an important distinction between costumes and props: costumes are required and are part of the dancer, whereas props are optional and largely detachable materials.

Location or environment is a resource used for marking the placement of dancers. Different parts of the environment that surround the dancers can be used as points of references. For “Bring Me The Night”, we held practices on campus at Upper Sproul and used its various reference marks to remember where our placements should be.

Note the exclusion of one important individual: the choreographer. When discussing a single dance set, the choreographer is not a resource; he/she is actually the user, as the choreographer is the one who does the organizing.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The high level goal for this organizing system is to produce a dance that is pleasing and enjoyable for the audience and that satisfies the vision of the choreographer. However, on a more specific level, one will discover that there are 4 main goals that a choreographer hopes to achieve in a set: 1) fairness for all dancers, 2) conveying the theme of the dance, 3) proper execution of moves, and 4) cleanliness of the set. The interactions that occur in the set are motivated by and carried out with these 4 goals in mind, and “Bring Me The Night” is no exception. Choreographers may interact with individual dancers (to assess their execution and cleaniness), collections of dancers, and props (to demonstrate a move to the dancers).

It is important to note that these 4 goals often occur in separate stages, so that even though the interaction may involve the same agents, the purpose for each of these interactions is different. For example, a choreographer may interact with the same group of dancers in both the execution and cleanliness phases, but the purpose of the interaction for the former is to improve technical ability while the latter is to spruce up the overall piece in order to look good cohesively.

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The intrinsic static and dynamic properties of the dancers allow the choreographer to apply different organizing principles in his/her set. These properties – which are also resource descriptions of dancers – include size and sex (intrinsic static), and skills and experience (intrinsic dynamic). In “Bring Me The Night”, the most prominent organizing principle was sex – there were parts of the piece devoted to just women, in which the choreographer loosely referred to as “the girls part”. The choreographer also used size as an organizing principle – it was apparent that the taller dancers were placed in the back. Note that in the domain of dance teams, being “placed in the back” for a set usually has a negative connotation. So this presents an issue for the choreographer: should a tall dancer always be placed in the back – even when he/she is relatively skilled – for the sake of making the set look good? If not, then at what point of the dance would it be appropriate to have taller dancers in the front? The choreographer on our team attempted to solve this problem by placing the taller dancers more towards the center at all times.

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The organization of the resources occurs during a phase of dance preparation called “blocking”. “Blocking” is when the choreographer places the dancers in specific positions. The dancers will invariably move around throughout the piece, but their physical locations and where they are supposed to be at any point in time remains constant.

However, when the interactions occur is largely dependant upon the choreographer. For example, the time in which a choreographer wants to interact with a single dancer versus a collection of dancers is never pre-planned; it is all determined on the fly. As the lead in “Bring Me The Night”, the choreographer often interacts on a one-to-one basis with me more than any other dancer, and often interacts in collections with the others.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

It is easy to assume that all elements involved in a dance set are resources – after all, from an outside perspective, it appears that all that is going on is a bunch of individuals lined up in formation and doing a set of relatively similar moves. However, this level of thinking is superficial and erroneous. As a dancer, I saw firsthand how all of the organization and interactions were driven through the choreographer. As mentioned early, the choreographer is also the user of the organizing system. In many ways, the choreographer is also the visionary; all of the organizing and interactions are meant to fulfill his/her vision of what the dance is to look like.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Many elements of the organizing system here will not be carried over to a more collective level, such as studying the showcase as a whole. The most noticeable difference is that the user will no longer be the choreographer; it actually becomes the audience. In fact, the choreographer may himself/herself be part of the dance. At this level, the organizing system becomes very much like that of a museum or zoo, where the primary interaction becomes just observing the resources. According to the TDO, people often visit institutions with physical resources because “they value the direct, perceptual, or otherwise unmediated interaction that these organizing systems support”. This may not apply to the domain of dance performances, because although the resources are physical, there is no way for the audience to have any direct perceptual interaction with them other than simply observing with their eyes.

Organizing My Personal Computer

Overview

My personal computer is an organizing system that contains a lot of folders and files of different kinds. Even though, the search feature reduces the need for organizing files in my personal computer, it does not replace it entirely. Organizing my personal computer can simplify storing, retrieving and interacting with resources. Not only it is much easier to find what I am looking for in a well-organized computer, but also it is visually pleasing.

What resources are being used?

The scope of my organizing system includes all the files, folders, programs and operating system in the computer but it does not include external hard drives, flash drives, or content on the internet, unless files are transferred from those to the personal computer, in which case, those files will become part of the organizing system. All of the resources are digital, and resources are continually added to this organizing system. Some of the resources may need to be deleted periodically. Some of the resources are unique (i.e. text files that I created, photographs that I have taken), while some of them are not (i.e. music files that are purchased online).

Why are the resources organized?

I use my computer several hours each day for various purposes from checking emails, to writing papers, to paying bills. A personal computer is an organizing system that supports many different interactions such as creating, maintaining, searching, accessing, modifying and sharing. These interactions may depend on the types of resources (files) in the organizing system.  This organizing system satisfies personal goals.

How much are the resources organized?

The extent to which my personal computer is being organized depends on my needs and also the amount of data that I have/will have on my computer. The organizing principle may depend on both my goal and the type of file that is being organized. Depending on my goal, it may be more helpful for me  to organize my files by date or by name. Similarly, it can be more useful to organize some types of files (i.e. picture files) by date and some others (i.e. music files) by name.

The level of granularity the user (myself) chooses for the organizing system mainly depends on their organizing tendencies. I can choose to pile all my files on the desktop and not put them in folders, or I may decide to meticulously organize every resource in an appropriate folder. Lower level of granularity will increase recall, but reduce precision. If I put all the documents related to info- 202 in a general folder, it will be more difficult to retrieve a specific document. I even may need to rely on other organizing principles to find the document, i.e. sorting by creation date. But if I use appropriate subfolders within info-202 folder, I can more precisely locate the document I am looking for.

When are the resources organized?

Organization can be imposed on resources at various times. Files can be organized as soon as they are created. Sometimes the files are transferred from outside; so, they can be organized after becoming part of the collection. The files can be modified, renamed, duplicated, or be interacted with in some other way; organization may also be imposed on them after such changes.

Who does the organizing?

As the owner and user of my personal computer I do most of the organizing in this organizing system. The operating systems [creators] also play a role in organizing my personal computer. For example mac has some predefined folders for downloads, pictures, music, movies, etc. Also, the photos that I take using my phone, are automatically added to iPhoto app through cloud. Therefore, my interactions with these resources will be limited by the properties of the app.)

Other consideration

The organizing decisions can later affect the types of interactions in an organizing system. A more granular organization will encourage more accessing type interactions, while a less granular organization will result in more searching type interactions.

Google Scholar

OVERVIEW

Scientific research is published in many periodic journals since beginning of 19th century. It enables sharing of collective human knowledge and wisdom. These articles/papers are a result of the extensive research done by researchers in specific domains.

Google Scholar[1] is a digital bibliographic database and search engine of published scholarly literature across varied disciplines. It indexes research papers, books, articles, publications etc. and is very popular in academia. It is interesting in the way it applies the organization principles to solve a complex problem of distributing collective human wisdom in the form of scholarly literature.

1.1         WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING ORGANIZED?

Google scholar is a digital organizing system. Documents of various types and formats are being organized. It indexes “full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected web pages that are deemed to be ‘scholarly.’”[2] It organizes knowledge, which is represented in variety of formats. It was launched in late 2004 and organizes articles created in 1901. All articles have been converted to digital formats that can be viewed on the Internet. The unit of organization is one single document. The system is designed to locate resources and users can form a collection in their own personal library. Resources are created by crawling the papers over the Internet. Older articles were digitized by Google in collaboration with libraries/organizations around the world.

In this case, the resources are the digital copies of the articles. It is not organizing the actual paper but a copy of the resource.

Some challenges and design decisions reflected in the system:

  1. The system designers could have decided only to include one document format, but they chose multiple formats for the system.
  2. They created crawlers and algorithms which will parse the page and fill resource description such as author, category, keyword etc. Some attributes are mandatory and some are not.
  3. All resources are searched. There is no distinction visible to the user if the resource is from 2013 or 1905, whether it is a pdf document or an html page. The system creators could have chosen to restrict the domain of resources but they kept it vast.
  4. Also, granularity is one challenge. They could have chosen to create one journal as one document. But they chose one document as a unit of organizing.
  5. Resource selection principle applied is “relevance” and “purpose” while retrieving.
  6. Retention policies – It seems the resource reside in the system indefinitely.

 

1.2         WHY ARE THE RESOURCES BEING ORGANIZED?

  • Resources are organized so that any user can easily look for relevant information aligned to his interests
  • Resources are indexed so that information retrieval can be efficient
  • It helps users to find any rare resource which they may not have physical access to.
  • By looking at certain attributes of the resource such as citations, credibility and trust could be established towards the research/writing by the author. The resource description play an important role in the organizing system
  • Resources have attributes such as cited by. These attributes can be tracked and interesting analysis can be performed such as “Most cited<attribute> paper<resource> in Information retrieval<category>”
  • Allows to create alerts for topics the user is interested in

 

1.3         HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES BEING ORGANIZED?

Google Scholar leverages the crawlers and parsers similar to the Google search engine. It crawls documents to identify authors, topics, keywords, citations, publication information, metadata such as publication year and month etc. The documents are parsed and statistical metrics[3] such as the h-index, h-median are calculated to determine how the resource relates to other resource. These metrics establish credibility of the document and hence the author. To support efficient search, resources are classified by disciplines and sub-discipline and keywords used to define them. There seems to be a combination of hierarchical and faceted classification happening in multiple places in the website. For example, it maintains hierarchical classification for categories and subcategories. Also, some categories overlap such as ICTD. One can reach the same resource via multiple keywords/tags.

It also has a three tier architecture and separates – Storage, Logic and Interface in the application.

If I think of the document type spectrum, it lies in the lowest left side as it is Narrative. Thinking about Information IQ plot, it lies in lowest left quadrant as it is a scanned document or a pdf document without any standard structure. There is no standard which governs how papers should be return. Sometimes IEEE standards are followed in terms of formatting, but there are others which are popular too.

1.4         WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

Research papers, articles are periodically being crawled and their resource description is captured to calculate metrics by Google Scholar algorithms and computational process. Google Scholar keeps track of citations for a document and generates Google Scholar Metrics periodically that may help the researcher further.

Maintenance and curation of resources is constant as well. Scores, citations are updated periodically using algorithms.

1.5         WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

Algorithms and computational processes organize the information within and between resources. Additionally, publishers are given guidelines on what they could do better so that Google Scholar can crawl their documents. Human intervention is also involved for moderation.

For older documents, Google digitized them and created its resource description in conjunction with experts.

1.6         OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

1. Google scholar looks for patterns in a document on the internet and then considers it to be a paper or not. There are a high number of false positive in the process. Documents are not always good quality research papers.

2. Google scholar doesn’t provide the actual data on how the results were derived. If I think about reproducible research, it relies on the research paper to do the job of describing it.

3. Quality of resources could be a challenge given the number of papers being generated every day. If the organizing system doesn’t maintain high quality resources, it may defeat its purpose and become a search engine.

[2] Vine, Rita (January 2006). “Google Scholar”. Journal of the Medical Library Association94 (1): 97–9. PMC 1324783.

My Vegetable Garden – Case Study

Shaun Giudici

Organizing System Case Study

OVERVIEW In our first assignment, ‘Everything is Organized’, I wrote about the domain of farming and the cycle of resources like sun, water, earth and manpower that in turn become the plants that sustain us as a population. In this assignment I’m narrowing the scope down to a vegetable garden, specifically the one I maintained from my childhood until I moved away from home at age 22. Both my father and grandfather taught me a lot about gardening; in some sense I feel that domain-specific knowledge is a resource. However, for the scope of this paper I will be focusing on more measurable resources and interactions of my vegetable garden. Gardens, especially those used to grow crops, undergo frequent change. After a brief overview of the seasonal cycle, I am going to narrow down to the organization of space and layout of plants in the garden.

A healthy garden requires maintenance year round. Preparation begins in the fall by turning under the previous years crops along with other yard trimmings and lime, to balance soil pH. In the early spring months we begin the germination process indoors, heating greenhouses in the cool New England climate. When warmer temperatures emerge we begin to plant directly in the garden. A lot of organization goes into deciding how to layout a garden for the season, here our adventure begins. A garden ready for planting is a beautiful thing. It is a blank slate, with the exception of some perennials, and the affordances seem unlimited. Oh the organizing possibilities!

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING ORGANIZED? We are creating an intentional arrangement of different genus of plants into areas of the garden. Some plants are germinated from seed indoors and later moved outdoors when the weather gets warmer.  Others are planted directly into the garden. A select few are perennial, meaning they occupy their space in the garden all year round and will not be moved. Considerations must be made on the basis of expected plant size at maturity, direction of growth, and environment requirements such as level of sunlight needed. Alternative materials are organized as well, such as grass clippings used for weed suppression; they are placed between plantings to suppress weeds and promote a healthier growing environment.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED? We organize our vegetable garden to provide high crop yields in a limited space. We also aim to enable better interactions during the growing season by creating watering zones and walking paths for the gardeners. Another consideration is the harvest. Its easier to walk up and down a row of corn to pick ears than it is if the 50 plants were scattered about.

Arrangement of the garden also takes into account the complementary nature of some plants. Benefits can be had by planting certain plants in close proximity to others. Garlic is a great example as it helps protect other plants from disease due to its accumulation of sulfur, a natural fungicide. Garlic also deters insects such as aphids. There are plants that complement it well, such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. On the flip side, garlic has been known to stunt the growth of beans and peas in its’ proximity.

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED? The users of the garden are mostly myself, Dad and Grandpa, who are all considered “power users”. Since we all know what to watch out for, we use minimal markings in our garden. Communal gardens, or those that exist for tourist viewing might have increased markers. This could mean guiding people around plants to avoid trampling, or signage to indicate the name or variety of a type of plant.

We organize the garden to support some basic interactions of walking between rows, bringing in a hose and sprinkler, and harvesting efficiently. Twine and stakes are used during the planting process to mark clear rows. This helps keep plants aligned and maximizes the space while also providing clear corridors for walking. Many of the plants are organized at planting time and then left to themselves to rise up as nature intended. In some cases intervention is necessary. Vining plants, for example, receive “training”, a physical intervention of guiding growth up trellises or away from other plants that may become suffocated. Tomatoes require more attention after planting, as they are grown upwards against stakes and need to be tied to the support as they grow taller, else they risk breaking under their own weight..

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED? Planting time is when we do a bulk of our organization. It is at this point that we need to have the proper foresight to know how large a plant will grow, and therefore how much spacing it needs between other plants. Different plants also thrive in different seasons and climates. Imagine its springtime, you hear more and more birds chirping outside each morning, the temperatures at night are getting to the high 40’s and 50’s which is well out of frost territory. Our classification system of plants in our inventory includes the recommended planting time for our climate zone and we choose to start with broccoli and lettuce, because we know that they can still thrive in these cool Spring temperatures. By the time summer hits, much of the lettuce harvest will be complete and we can reuse that space for heat-loving plants such as cucumbers and tomatoes.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING? As the gardener, I do the organizing. In the early days I would actually measure out each row, marking lines and digging in uniform rows. Inevitably I would try to squeeze too many plants into a space and my knowledgeable fathers, power users of the garden themselves, would provide their input. In some cases I learned the hard way, with plants that grossly overcrowded each other.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS Starting vegetable gardens from seed can be a high-loss endeavor. We must prepare ahead of time for seeds that will never sprout, and plants that will not survive the initial planting. Constant monitoring of plant health and replacement of fallen soldiers is important to maintaining a high-yield and healthy garden.

HTTP Cookies

HTTP Cookies

 Overview

The HTTP protocol is stateless; it mandates that a web server must respond to a client’s request without relating the request to previous or subsequent requests.1 Despite the statelessness dictated by the HTTP protocol, websites are aggressively tracking and canvassing their clients.2 HTTP cookies are the mechanism around the HTTP protocol’s statelessness; a cookie acts as container to store and send information about a specific client ‘s internet browsing patterns and preferences; this client information is sent back to a website/web server so that a web server can tailor its response to individual client.

What resources are being used?
Internet cookies typically store a client’s username for a particular website or some other string of data that can uniquely identify the client. Additionally, each cookie stores the name of the domain/website its associated with, the path on the web server the for which the cookie applies and expiration date for the cookie.

Why are the resources are being used
A previously mentioned, the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol prevents a web server from knowing the identity of the client making requests until the user authenticates/logins into a the web servrer; without some knowledge of the client’s identity, the web server is unable to accommodate user preferences or serve up tailored content to the user. Nonetheless, there are many situations where it is advantageous for a web server to know the identity of the client so that it can tailor the delivery of content to user preferences. For instance, when a client first goes to amazon.com to do some shopping, its advantageous for Amazon.com to immediately serve the client content about products that the client has viewed in the past or other products that the website thinks that the client maybe interested in, without requiring the client to sign in/authenticate first. Signing into a web site/authenticating requires effort on the client’s part; Amazon needs to make the shopping experience as interesting and easy as possible to increase the likelihood that that the client will be willing to buy something. To have a future way of seamlessly identifying a given client, the web server stores data about the clients identity inside a cookie and then stores the cookie inside the client’s browser. Upon the client re-visiting the website, the web server identifies the client by retrieving the cookie data that it previously stored in the client’s web browser.

How much are the resources organized?

Cookies have an specific and limited scope. As mandated by Internet Engineering Task Force, cookies can only store 4kb of data, about 40 characters. Cookies have a specific and limited scope because they serve a specific function when merged with other web server resources; a cookie’s explicit purpose is to help the web server identify a specific client. Once the web server extracts the data inside the client’s website cookie, the web server matches the data to the web site’s database/and or maps the cookie data onto the web site’s internal programming functions in the web server. Upon successfully matching the cookie data, the cookie data will trigger the appropriate web server response.

When are the resources organized?

As previously alluded to earlier, when a user visits a web site, the web server of the website will search for the web site’s cookie in the user’s web browser/hard disk. If the cookie does not exist, then, the web server will store/set data about the client inside a cookie as a file. Additionally, when a web server does find a website cookie, in many cases, it will preform organizational maintenance activities on the cookie by update/modify the cookie data.

Who does the organizing activities?

All organizing activities surrounding cookies are conducted the website/web server; it is completely responsible for organizing, accessing, and retrieving cookie data. The client is unaware of/oblivious to the organizing activities surrounding cookies that the website/web server is conducting.

Other considerations

Using cookies is an unreliable way for a web server to identify a givdn client. At any point, the client has the option and ability to delete any or all the cookie files from his or her web browser. Many clients frequently delete cookies from their browsers over privacy concerns; many client’s don’t want to be tracked by a website. Additionally, when a web server attempts to create a cookie file in a client’s web browser/hard disk, the client’s browser has the option to reject the incoming cookie.

1Hudson, Paul, PHP in a Nutshell, (O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2009), 170.

2Auerbach, David, “You Are What You Click”, Nation 296, Vol. 9 (March 2013): 30. 

Buying Wood

Overview (1 pt)

Furniture is all around us but not many take time to consider what it takes to create these essential components of our homes. To create useful and strong furniture a carpenter needs to get the best raw materials for the project, taking it from a mere woodwork project to an art. A good organizing for these raw materials enables the carpenter to achieve these goals. Wood shops go some way into trying to achieve this with organizing systems that enable interaction between the customer and resources, and I will try to analyze how they try to achieve this.

 

What resources are being used? (2 pts)

The resources being organized are physical wood pieces. Customers visit wood shops with various woodworking projects they intend to do and hence need varied types and sizes of wood pieces for each. Woodworking projects range from flooring, tiling, roofing to creating cupboards or bookshelves. The resources, i.e. wood are passive and need interaction initiated on them by staff or customers.

 

Wood in the shop consists at the most abstract level, the type of wood i.e. natural wood blocks, which are mostly used for framing. The other type is wooden boards which are manufactured and are mostly used for making surfaces. Natural wood contains categories for hard wood and soft wood that is then followed by categories based on the names of the tree e.g. mahogany or teak. Wood boards are mostly manufactured to serve different purposes and thus are categorized on their use such as block boards, hard boards and vinyl

 

Why are the resources organized? (2 pts)

Resources are organized primarily on the use warrant to serve customers and staff in the shop. The shop intends to sell the wood to customers hence it must provide a system which allows them to interact with the resources. For customers resources are organized so that it is easier for them to select the wood they want to use and also know the other types of wood that is can substitute the one they originally wanted. The vocabulary problem where differently descriptions are used by customers and the shop has to be addressed necessitates the need for an organizing system which allows customers to easily find the wood they want based on the physical properties.

 

Since customer transactions are usually infrequent the organizing system can often be seen to have intentional arrangement to make it easier for staff to interact with resources. For staff they would want to organize resources primarily on the basis of the interactions they want to have with the resources. Wood pieces that need to be replaced often will therefore be organized strategically to enable this interaction. Those that may need other interactions such as cutting or modifications will also need special organization that will enable the achievement of this requirement.

 

How much are the resources organized? (2 pts)

Abstraction is of little concern in the system with granularity being more pertinent. Customer requirements for resources differ greatly between projects, making precision a key factor in the system. A granular organization is thus implemented as they speed at which resources and recall are weighed less. The organizing principles of the system are based on the physical attributes facet. Wood shops usually implement multi-level hierarchical categories in their organizing system. Firstly the type of wood needed for each woodwork project requires hence that the resources be categorized on this property. The dimensions needed for the project also entail that the same wood be categorized differently on many properties of dimensions such as length, width or thickness of the board. Organizing systems for wood shops are very flexible to allow new categories to be accommodated because requirements for wood change greatly over time coupled with changes in supply. Other interactions that can happen on the resources will also affect organization. For example, wood planks may need to be cut for the customer thus this will affect the organization.

 

When are the resources organized? (1 pt)

Organization usually occurs at the start of business day where staff replenishes stock levels of wood in the shop to desired levels. Replenishment can also occur during the day if stock of a particular wood runs out or goes beyond a minimum set level. Resource organization also occurs every time when new resources are created in the system. This is when the shop either buys a new type of wood or when resources are added to the system. Interactions with the resources can also result in organization of resources. For example, if a wood plank is cut into smaller pieces, the new resources created will result in them being organized in different places or into one place where customers can get random pieces.

 

Who does the organizing? (1 pt)

The staff at the wood shop organizes the resources. They are expected to hold some special knowledge of the various types of wood in the shop together with some understanding of the uses of the wood. Since they are expected to move the wood for checking out, they can help decide where the resources should be located with the manager at the shop coordinating. They have to take into consideration the ease at which customers can interact with the resources whilst making sure they are able to navigate and select resources to checkout. Safety for customers is another consideration they factor in thus health and safety monitors can influence organization in a system.

 

Other considerations (1 pt)

The traditional wood shop consists of a medium sized shop, which can store all the wood in one area, however as some changes are happening to bigger shops were customers only see samples of the wood in product catalogs with well-defined resource descriptions. As such these systems are organized have catalogs as the different organizing system from the warehouse where the actual wood is stored and selected for delivery to the customer.

PeerLibrary: Organizing the world’s scientific knowledge

OVERVIEW

Since the dawn of science, it is estimated humans have published approximately 50 million scientific articles. In the biomedical and social sciences alone, there is a new publication added approximately every minute of every day. Discussed here is one novel organizing system that is currently under development– a web application called PeerLibrary— that strives to create an enriched, collaborative experience around navigating this corpus of knowledge.

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING USED?

Scientific articles are the primary resources being organized by PeerLibrary. The entire service is centered around access to and collaborative human-generated description of these articles, in the form of digital document annotations. Resource descriptions are extracted from each article, including author names, the abstract text, publication year, and journal information. Because many articles are not available in HTML/XML formats, descriptions provided by journals, users, and through Optical Character Recognition must unfortunately be relied on. Additionally, it is notable that users in this system are not only interacting with the articles, but also considered resources themselves as potential authors of both articles and annotations.

One major design consideration in building this system was determining exactly how articles would be selected and added to the PeerLibrary resource collection. While the overall goal is to make all of the world’s scientific knowledge open for discussion, to dynamically add every article as it is published is impractical. APIs to journal and archive databases help fill in much of the resources, but complex issues such as user authentication to access articles behind paywalls and timely discovery of newly published work persist. An Import feature was added to the current application version to allow users to quickly be able to access all of their initial resources of interest in the cloud. Of course, this useful feature poses a challenge for the organizing system because it provides opportunities for duplicate articles to be created and added to the resource collection. The resource descriptions, such as article title, year of publication, and author names must be used consistently to properly handle duplicate cases.

The matter of scoping which kind of resources would be allowed into the collection is also an important, non-trivial conversation that occurred early in the development process. Lots of different kinds of articles could benefit from collaborative annotation, including fiction writing, news stories, and humanities research. However, building a tool that specifically supports interactions around scientific inquiry narrows the types of resource descriptions that are possible while maximizing their utility. For example, entities like abstracts can be consistently used as comprehensive previews of articles, journals usually provide information about the field of study that the article is primarily relevant to, and authors can be connected to articles, fields of study, and to other authors in a meaningful social network.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

Historically, publishing of scholarly literature has been a practice that exploits the research community while creating lucrative profits for publishing companies. To drive science forward, researchers need access to the highest quality and most relevant past work that can inform context and decisions for current and future studies. Furthermore, it is not enough to allow articles to be openly and freely accessed. There is increasingly a need for a space to openly exchange knowledge, feedback, and insights about the conducted research. PeerLibrary recognizes that researchers need access to intuitive collaboration tools in order to get used to being in this open science mindset. Somewhere down the road, this approach might help build a more open, sustainable, and high quality peer review system.

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

When scientific articles are added to PeerLibrary, they are parsed for all of the resource descriptions discussed earlier, and then added to a NoSQL MongoDB database right away. The documents are added to the collection in a very unstructured way and saved as independent Document objects, each containing resource descriptions in structured fields. Unlike in systems with more heterogeneous resource description formats, PeerLibrary worries minimally about how documents are organized in the collection and instead relies on the structure of these resource descriptions to facilitate user interactions such as searching for articles.

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

Article resources have the potential to be organized by any resource description properties as soon as they are added. Users dynamically organize articles into sub-collections of interest by narrowing their search with keywords, specific authors, publication date ranges, and other descriptors. Users can also share pointers to articles and specific annotations with others, creating the possibility of group collections.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

The organization of articles in PeerLibrary is done largely by the users. The crowd sourced approach of this tool allows users to select articles relevant to personal or group research interests and read, share, discuss, and export citations for. While journals impose structured descriptions of the articles, the collaborative layer of user-generated knowledge that PeerLibrary creates enables each user to create custom collections.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

An notable complication in this system is that many users who would like to sign up for an account to read and annotate documents might be authors of articles contained in the resource collection. To protect against duplicating a person’s identity as a user and author, a decision was made to create a Person identity for each unique author that is in the current corpus. When a new user goes to create an account at PeerLibrary, the system first checks whether the information they provide is a potential match for a Person that is already in the system. If so, the User and Person identities get linked together to avoid the vocabulary problem of synonymy and provide an richer user experience. When a group of authors publish a new article, it is also important that this article be listed under the correct individuals’ profile pages. Occurrences such as multiple researchers having the same name, individuals changing their names, and inconsistent formatting of name strings across an individual’s publications (e.g. including a middle initial or not) pose significant obstacles here.

Barack Obama for America Campaign Office Volunteers

Overview

This case concerns an Obama for America satellite campaign office volunteer base in Iowa in the months leading up to the 2008 Presidential election.

During the 2008 election cycle, then-Senator Obama’s campaign operated a headquarters office in downtown Des Moines and over 50 satellite offices spread across Iowa. Each office was designated as a local hub for all election activities in specific areas, also called ‘turfs’. These offices were managed by one to several ‘field organizers’, each responsible for organizing and mobilizing the voters in a specific turf they had been assigned to. While the organizing system that is a political campaign office can be looked at through a variety of different scopes, involving a large combination of types of resources, this case study will specifically examine the organizing activities undertaken by a field organizer related to recruitment and management of their office’s volunteer base.

What resources are being organized?

This case study will consider the volunteers within a field organizer’s turf as the resources being organized.

Technically in this organizing system, it is true that a field organizer is managing many classes of resource types, from volunteer snacks to paper clips. However, the volunteers themselves represent an invaluable and more cardinal set of resources to their field organizer.

Because volunteers have agency, they each have a nearly infinite assortment of affordances that could be associated with them and are essentially immune to the concept of effectivity. This means the supported interactions are potentially infinite though in practice limited to a specific set of desired interactions with voters and other volunteers.

In every case, the selection step is self-executing: once an individual expresses that they would like to be a volunteer, they automatically become a volunteer resource for a field organizer. Once an individual has become a volunteer, they may undergo additional training in order to take on new responsibilities to better assist their field organizer. This could mean everything from becoming ‘Intern Supervisor’ to ‘Neighborhood Team Leader’, meaning that some resources in this system may come to utilize their agency to help organize sub-sets of the system itself.

Why are the resources organized?

After advertising, having active volunteers is the next most effective way for a Presidential campaign team to drive more supporters to the voting booth on election day. Volunteers can make personal connections with voters and supporters over the phone and face-to-face, and have a much more measurable impact on an election than ordering up robo-calls.

However, modern American elections are often decided by the voting decisions of as little as 1% of the voting electorate. Effectively organizing volunteers at the campaign office level according to the imposed policies and organizing principles of the managing authority that is the campaign headquarters, is therefore an extremely important consideration for all Presidential Campaigns.

How much are the resources organized?

The structure of the organizing system for the 2008 election established volunteers as active resources that were to be managed as closely as was possible without reducing overall effectiveness.

This emphasis on high efficiency was specifically designed to enable a field organizer to activate volunteer resources on the fly depending on an office’s daily needs. However, such efficiencies often led to a field organizer creating ad hoc and implicit classification schemes, with highly precise faceted terms used to organize their volunteer resource descriptions. This could create problems if an organizer shifted to a different town mid-cycle, or if their organizing schema was to be shared with a different organizer (if both had highly ad-hoc methods of arranging their resource descriptions, this created problems for any kind of cross-walk evaluation).

Volunteers themselves were assigned to within various levels of a faceted ‘team’ classification scheme, based mostly around collocation. Volunteers could be assigned as part of one or many of a neighborhood team, a university student group or some other grouping along a distinguishing characteristic (this could be say, a shared interest or cultural self-identification like a ‘Moms for Obama’ team). Once in a team, members of a team might be reached out to at once to accomplish shared tasks, instead of having to recall them each individually.

In addition to being assigned a ‘team’, volunteers’ resource descriptions will often come to be tagged using a property-based categorization. ‘Phone-banking’, ‘Door-to-door canvassing’ are each examples of tags a volunteer might receive depending on the properties they display.

  • When are the resources organized?

The field organizer is continually reorganizing the volunteers from his or her turf according to any changes to a near infinite set of variables. 100 new volunteers being identified in a turf might cause the total reevaluation of an existing team structure, with ripple effects throughout the rest of the system. Or a set of volunteers’ class might start up again. Or a volunteer might drop out. Because of the need to continually reevaluate the current organization, a field organizer must ensure that their system is highly flexible and able to accession new volunteers seamlessly.

  • Who does the organizing?

The field organizer is responsible for developing and maintaining his or her system of volunteers. The organizer is also responsible for continually shaping and reshaping the classification of volunteers within their system to maximize the number of volunteer interactions. This can mean completely reassigning volunteers to new teams, promoting or demoting volunteers out of certain roles, as well as offering training seminars in order to enable volunteers to support new property-based interactions.

  • Other considerations

In order to maximize the value derived from a volunteer base, a field organizer must pay special care to maintaining these resources. This could mean anything from paying them visits when they’re ill, to providing them with coffee when they show up to make calls at 9am on a Monday, to providing remedial phone call training. While the prior questions might not elucidate this sufficiently, it is important to underline that in this organizing system, maintenance is the most important activity that can be undertaken by the organizer to sustain the number of resources in the system, as well as ensure its health and longevity. A poorly maintained volunteer base is an obsolescent volunteer base.