Acknowledgements

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Author(s): The Open University

4.3 Ethical and legal considerations

You will need to be aware of privacy and confidentiality in relation to online communication. Email is generally considered private and should not be quoted without permission. Some conferences are not wholly public, so messages should not be copied outside the conference.

Online discussion may be read by people from other cultures and backgrounds, so be careful to avoid giving offence. Although people are usually very tolerant, it is still possible that someone could sue for libel.

4.2.4 Make clear your perspective

Try to avoid speaking impersonally: 'This is the way it is…', 'It is a fact that…'. That will sound dogmatic and leaves no room for anyone else's perspective. Why not start, 'I think…'? A common abbreviation is IMHO (in my humble opinion) – or even IMNSHO (in my not so humble opinion). If you are presenting someone else's views, say so, perhaps by a quote and acknowledgement.

2.2 Evaluating web resources

One of the good things about the Web is also one of its drawbacks – anybody can publish anything. This means that the Web is an amasing source of information and is full of fascinating resources.

However, in order to get to useful information you may have to work your way through lots of irrelevant material. Even when you think you have found something relevant, how do you know it is reliable, and how can you judge the quality, accuracy and bias of what you find?

Most publicatio
Author(s): The Open University

References

6.6 Modelling the relationships between use cases

There are two situations when you would consider adding details to a use case diagram:

• to identify a common task (and its associated scenarios) that is shared between two or more use cases;

• to record any alternatives or additions to the main success scenario as separate use cases.

In both situations, the new tasks are shown as new use cases (ovals) and, as you will see below, the UML provides a suitable notation (known as
Author(s): The Open University

6.4 Scenarios

The purpose of a use case is to meet the goal of its associated actor(s), such as a guest making a reservation with a hotel. This implies that a use case should include everything that must be done to meet that goal. For example, if it is necessary to check the availability of rooms in the hotel for the desired length of stay before accepting a reservation, then we expect the use case to contain that check. In general, a use case contains a narrative about the flow of events that specifies a
Author(s): The Open University

7.2.1 E-shop

This is the most ubiquitous form of commerce on the World Wide Web. It involves a company presenting a catalogue of its wares to internet users and providing facilities whereby such customers can purchase these products. Almost invariably such a site will contain facilities for ordering and paying for products by means of credit cards. The sophistication of sites described by this business model range from just the simple presentation of a static catalogue to the presentation of an interactiv
Author(s): The Open University

5.6 Design

Designing a distributed system can also be a problem, for example the fact that computers in a distributed system are joined by communication media which can stretch over thousands of miles provides an added dimension to the design process in that response time can be a problem. Another, equally serious problem is that of reliability, for example the fact that a hardware malfunction can bring down a poorly-designed distributed system.

As an example of one design problem that a distribut
Author(s): The Open University

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