Building a solution

A week of meetings
Have had a good run of meetings with colleagues about this project - the result of which has been an emergent solution to the requirements - with the following dimensions:

• Technical
  
• Social / Community of Practice
• QA processes
• User / Outputs

DIVAS Meeting
The 2nd meeting so far and very useful in moving things forward. In terms of what was discussed, the following was highlighted:

• A lot of the 'value' delivered by the project can be delivered through the community of practice application (NING). Essentially, the meta-data is limited in what it can capture, mainly due to the data being validation specific and too varied to be isolated. Fundamentally, the metadata is useful in top-level searching of validation documents, but the 'hidden' value can really only be discussed in a more text friendly environment.
  
• The NING social network (and events) will allow people to offer support along side the outputs of the validation process.
• The issue of document findability was raised (as it is a key concern) and the method through which it can be presented to users (through NING?). The technical members identified a case to investigate the HIVE API functionality to offer a customizable solution to presenting search data. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API)
  
• The HIVE API was offered as something which would be useful to investigate, not only for this project, but as a exercise that would be useful in exploring the capabilities of the repository. In addition, this API approach would also be useful in simplifying the process of how metadata is collected and recorded against any uploaded documents.
• The purpose or 'vision' of the project was discussed - aiming to identify some over-arching requirements for the project, in terms of what outputs are required to be successful - i.e. what a a good solution would look like. It was noted that a good solution would involve matching current QA processes (in regard to recording documentation/findability); having a system that can be 'interrogated' by a user in order to find validation examples that match their area of interest (this would include a 'list' of related documents to that specific validation); and, a search tool that could be embedded or available within the 'context' of a supportive social network.
  
• A further meeting was agreed between Sam Rowley, Song Ye, Myself and Chris Gray - to discuss QA processes, technical requirements and use-case scenarios.