Abstract
In this chapter, the affordances of the social Web in managing patterns are explored. For that, a classification of stakeholders of patterns and a process for producing patterns are proposed. The role of the stakeholders in carrying out the different workflows of the process is elaborated and, in doing so, the prospects presented by the technologies/applications underlying the social Web are highlighted. The directions for future research, including the potential of the convergence of the social Web and the Semantic Web, are briefly explored.
TopBackground
This section presents the necessary terminology specific to patterns and a perspective on related work. It also highlights certain limitations of the current media towards managing patterns. For the sake of this chapter, the term ‘managing’ subsumes managing the process, people, and the product (namely the pattern itself). In particular, managing a process includes responsibilities such as planning, scheduling, monitoring, and so on; managing people includes responsibilities such as facilitating communication and collaboration; and managing a product includes responsibilities such as archiving/querying/retrieving patterns, disseminating patterns, manipulating patterns (including transforming patterns, and extracting or reordering text in descriptions of patterns), and organizing patterns.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Pattern Engineering: A systematic and disciplined approach to (1) the definition, subsequent use, and maintenance, and (2) interface to humans, machines, and other entities of knowledge of a member of the pattern space within the given constraints of available resources.
Semantic Web: A perceived evolution of the Web that adds technological infrastructure for better knowledge representation, interpretation, and reasoning.
Social Web: A perceived evolution of the Web in a direction that is driven by ‘collective intelligence,’ realized by information technology, and characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects.
Implicit Knowledge: A type of human knowledge that can be, but not has been, articulated.
Explicit Knowledge: A type of human knowledge that has been articulated.
Pattern: An empirically proven solution to a recurring problem that occurs in a particular context.
Pattern Management System: An interactive software system with responsibilities that include archiving a selected collection of patterns that could evolve (added, deleted, or modified), facilitating the discovery of those patterns via navigation or searching, and rendering those patterns on a user agent. For example, a PMS could be based on a client-server environment of the Web.