This page represents a provisional model of the essential requirements for the SKOPE system. The model is based on the approach described in the book Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design (Gause & Weinberg,1989) and comprises three types of elements: users, functions, and attributes.
The purpose of this model is to ensure that we are building the right system.
SKOPE Users
In this model a user represents someone who (1) will be affected in some way by the SKOPE system, and (2) we choose to take into account when designing, implementing, or deploying the system.
Researcher | Scholar in the social and natural sciences who wants browser-based access to the best-available reconstructions of key environmental variables for a given location and temporal interval. |
Tinkerer | Researcher with a more focused interest in a specific reconstruction model, and who wishes to adjust parameters and rerun the models. |
Modeler | Researcher who seeks to build and offer broad access to new or modified models and/or retrodicted environmental data through SKOPE. |
Provider | Representative of an organization that provides access to data or services via the SKOPE system. |
Devop | Person responsible for developing, testing, deploying, configuring, administering or troubleshooting the SKOPE system. |
SKOPE Functions
These are the essential capabilities of the system including things that the system does and that users do with the system.
SKOPE Attributes
Sometimes referred to as non-functional requirements, these are the qualities that make it beneficial to use the SKOPE system compared to using ad hoc scripts, running individual programs directly, managing data manually, etc.
| Transparent | Easy to determine the provenance, ownership, usage rights, and citations for any digital artifacts either available to researchers through SKOPE, or used to produce or deliver the artifacts available through SKOPE, where digital artifacts include data sets, visualizations, scripts, and software packages. |
| Repeatable | Practical within the SKOPE environment to repeat all or a subset of the sequences of computations and other operations involved in producing any data set or visualization previously created through the SKOPE system. Feasible to reproduce the steps necessary to produce any such artifact or visualization outside of the SKOPE system. |
| Responsive | |
| Available | |
| Scalable | |
| Modular | |
Secure | |
| Testable |