Chapter 9: Semantic Elicitation - Uncovering Meaning

Overview

In the last section we saw that the application makes meaning. But how does the application designer determine what meaning to include in the application? Historically, application designers dealt with the data as presented and represented to them from users and existing systems, without giving a great deal of systematic thought as to what the data meant, whether this was the right data at the right level of abstraction, and whether these were the right procedures to deal with these issues.

This chapter is central in that up to this point we have been making a case for semantically based systems. We have been reframing common situations from a semantic standpoint. The chapters that follow explore what to do with this semantic information once you have it. This chapter deals with the central issue of finding the semantics in a particular domain.

This chapter deals with three keys aspects of the search:

• Where—Where are the productive areas to look for clues about the semantics of the problem domain you're addressing?

• When—When, relative to other system development tasks, should you be doing this search?

• How—How do you go about this process to maximize your likelihood of success?