[Draft] EARL Requirements

The ERT WG is chartered to produce a requirements document for EARL. A requirements document will help the group focus on a clear target in order to develop EARL as quickly as possible. The following is not a complete list of requirements but much more an intial attempt to capture the essential contents for a requirements document.

Target Audience

Evaluation tool developers who want to output EARL
Tool developers who want to interpret EARL
Specification developers who want to incorporate EARL into their work (e.g. DCMI, IMS, QA, ...).

Deliverables

EARL Reference Manual: Detailed description of the EARL RDF schema, the classes, and the properties.
EARL Primer: Introductory document with many examples and guidance for people new to EARL and RDF.

Scope

Persistence of test results: When structural components that are not context sensitive change location (without actually changing), EARL results should remain valid.; Example: informational image along with a longdesc move to a different location within a Web page, the longdesc tests should remain valid.; Example: an illustrative image moved from @@@; Example: security requirement does not allow the photograph and the name of an individual to be published beside each other, but the two are publishable otherwise.; Example: katie will send example about multiple levels of security access. @@@; Example: content-negotiation @@@; Example: dynamic pages @@@; Can we describe the context changes for which a given test is robust?
Locating precisely the subject of the result: EARL needs to provide sufficient information about the location in the content to which the results apply.; Example: which of the 5 images on a page are not accessible?; Example: header element of a table missing, should the error message point to the start of the table vs a specific cell?; Example: querying a repository of test results for results to a specific area of the content (e.g. main content area in a portal).
Test descriptions: EARL only describes test results, not test descriptions or processes. However, in the spec we need to explain examples of how different tests can be related to each other.

Implementations

For each feature we need to have:

code examples
test suites (???)

Implementation Tracking

Maintain a list of tools which support EARL.

Issue Tracking

Bug tracking and issues list.

Last updated on $Date: 2005/03/07 15:29:49 $ by $Author: shadi $

Copyright © 1994-2005 W3C^® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply. Your interactions with this site are in accordance with our public and Member privacy statements.