CEDAR User Scenarios

User Scenarios describe a system’s functionality in terms of how its users want or expect to apply it. CEDAR’s first User Scenarios were developed before the proposal was submitted, and have been undergoing refinement since the award was made.

We derive CEDAR User Scenarios from several sources, in addition to those in the proposal. Our colleagues working on the ImmPort and ISA projects have presented user scenarios to meet their objectives, and we’ve especially considered the BioCADDIE Metadata Working Group scenarios as relevant input. In the broader BD2K community, we work with groups representing other biomedical domains, and these groups present their own needs via user scenarios. Finally, we develop user scenarios through analyses provided by our team’s scientific and technical staff, taking into consideration good user practices like that of the FAIR project.

High Level User Scenarios

Flowchart showing five steps of creating metadata templatesThe Goals and Objectives of the CEDAR Project contain many of the principal high-level scenarios for CEDAR, useful for understanding the broad scope of the project. While these provide an outline of the work at the highest level, they are too broad to drive the creation of specific software. For that, we need more detailed user scenarios.

Detailed User Scenarios

More detailed scenarios are used to drive the development of specific features of the system. Example titles for these scenarios are outlined below.

Of course, there are many types of CEDAR users, and they will use different subsets of the scenarios below. To properly design the system, we must consider the User Persona, the descriptions of the different types of users. During the second full year of the project, we will consider how the different User Persona will use CEDAR in different ways.

Once we finish developing detailed CEDAR scenarios such as these, we will make them available on this site.

Template authoring

  • Define a template
  • Define a metadata element
  • Define a value set (collection of terms)
    • Select terms from existing controlled vocabularies (e.g. ontologies or value sets in BioPortal)
    • Select terms using a query over an ontology
  • Define a template metadata element with specific attributes
    • Title, description, and any association with IRIs
    • If it consists of individual element
      • Element type, and whether element is required
      • If element value is one or more items from a value set (that is, a collection of terms), the specification of the value set
    • If it is a collection of metadata element(s) that make up this element, the various metadata elements within it
    • Cardinality (minimum and maximum number allowed)
    • Order of this element in template
  • Define tree-like template with nested metadata elements
  • Suggest relevant metadata elements (predictive)
  • Save (versioned) template to CEDAR’s template repository
  • Edit existing template from the template repository
  • View metadata templates and elements, and their histories
  • Add new metadata elements with minimal effort

Template repository

  • Access template services and resources via REST APIs
  • Store, search, and revise templates
  • Store, search, and revise metadata elements
  • Store, search, and revise value sets
  • Search for text and concepts, optionally by element
  • View time stamp and contributor for all resources

Template instantiation (creating metadata resources)

  • Pre-specify template(s) for particular users to fill out
  • Select existing template(s) to be filled out
  • Receive suggestions for metadata values to fill in
  • Save metadata
  • Edit metadata
  • View metadata edit history

Metadata repository

  • Access metadata services and resources via REST APIs
  • Search metadata resources using semantic meaning
  • Filter metadata resources based on precisely specified concepts (e.g, from ontologies)
  • Contribute new metadata to existing resources
  • Correct and augment metadata in existing resources
  • Use feedback and resolution mechanisms to update original metadata content

Metadata re-use

  • Export a metadata record to another repository
  • Export an update of a metadata record to another repository
  • Display a metadata record in user-requested format
  • Present a collection of metadata records for external analysis
  • Validate a metadata record, optionally suggesting changes
  • Evaluate multiple metadata records for quality and consistency
Last Updated: 
Sep 25 2020 - 11:14am
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