Project Description Analysis and Relevant Questions

Author: Cahid Arda Öz

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With the pandemic, virtual museums, and art galleries have become prevalent worldwide. People can partake in cultural activities by virtually visiting such places.

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In this project, an online art gallery with community platform is aimed which is motivated by providing both collaborative and single user activity.

Platform description and emphasis on collaboration

The platform itself is run by the content creators who are the users. In this project, users can share their art items, comment & discuss about art items, and make exhibitions solo or collaboratively.

User Requirements:

• Share, comment, discuss art (where? -> On the discussion forum) (1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.2)
• Make exhibitions solo or collaboratively (1.1.1.1)

Question: What is the nature of the discussion forum? Will each art item have an associated discussion page?

This platform shall protect the art items by issuing copyrights on demand.

System Requirements:

• Issue copyrights (1.2.3.1)

Question: Protection of art items requires some action when a violation takes place. What will the platform do when there is a copyright violation? Remove the post? Punish the violator in some way?

In discussion forums, people discuss about art.

User requirement:

• Can discuss art on the discussion forum (1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.2)

In order to make this forum convenient; text used in titles and the body of the entries can be searchable semantically.

User Requirement:

• Users shall be able to semantically search text from the titles and bodies of the entries on the forum (1.1.2.3) System Requirement:
• Forum shall support semantic search of text from the titles and bodies of the entries on the forum

Thus, the application should allow semantic search which provides/recommends any semantically related context based on the provided semantic tags.

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In this project, users will have levels based on their interaction with the platform, and their popularity.

Question: Should the users be able to see their own level? Should the users be able to see levels of other people? Is this feature solely intended to help with verifying users ("verify them based on their artistic values") or is it a publicly visible feature?

The interaction will be measured by the number of comments/shares on the platform, and the popularity will be measured by the number of followers, copyrighted items, and art exhibitions.

System Requirement:

• Platform shall keep track of the number of comments/shares on the platform and calculate and interaction level (1.2.1.1)
• Platform shall keep track of number of followers, copyrighted items and art exhibitions and calculate a popularity level (1.2.1.2)

Question: What does it mean to comment or share? Do we not consider entries or replies in the discussion forum as interaction, do we only consider interaction with art items? What does it mean to share something? Share it with followers? Do users have a feed where they see art shared and published by the people they follow?

If the artist claim for verified account, the system should verify them based on its artistic values that contribute to the platform.

User Requirement:

• Users shall be able to claim verified account 1.1.4.1 System Requirement:
• System shall be able to verify users based on artistic values (1.2.4.1)

Question: What are artistic values?

As a bonus, the platform shall offer a bidding system for the copyrighted artworks by the demand of the owner, and thus, artists can sell their items via this platform.

User Requirement:

• Artists shall be able to sell their artworks with a bidding system (1.1.5.1)
• Users shall be able to bid for artworks (1.1.5.2) System Requirement:
• System shall have a bidding system

Question: What type of bidding? How does the auction conclude, a time period, a price threshold, or single shot?

Question: Can the artist end the bidding by withdrawing the item and not selling it at all?

Question: How will the payment take place? Should the system include a way of payment? Is there some kind of e-wallet system?

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The platform should also track users’ activities, and based on the history, the platform may recommend similar artworks or artists of the users’ interests.

System Requirement:

• Platform shall keep track of user activity (1.2.1.3)
• Platform shall recommend users similar artworks and artists (1.2.6.1)

Question: What constitutes the user activity; events attended, art items viewed on the platform?

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In addition to online galleries, artists can also open physical exhibitions, and notify its followers via this platform as an event.

User Requirement:

• Users shall be able to follow artists
• Artists shall be able to notify their followers about physical exhibitions (1.1.1.4)

Question: The sentence starts with "in addition to online galleries", yet there is no description of online gallery in the project description. What is meant by an online gallery?

Question: Only result of following mentioned in the description is being notified about physical exhibitions. What else will happen when a user follows an artist?

People can attend these exhibitions, and mark their geographic locations via the platform using geotagging [3].

User Requirement:

• Users shall be able to mark their geographic locations via platform using geotagging (1.1.1.3)

The platform should recommend any other events of the users’ interests based on their geotag history.

System Requirement:

• System shall keep track of coordinates of the physical events, so that these coordinates can be used to infer which events a user has attended. (1.2.1.4)
• System shall use the events attended by the user when suggesting events to the user (1.2.6.2)

Question: What is meant by event, online/physical exhibitions?

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This project is mainly a web application with necessary API implementations for the front-ends. Additionally, this project requires a native Android application that supports the same functionalities. The native Android application should be designed user-friendly that keep the mobile users active on mobile as well.

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Users should be able to annotate some context (text or image annotation) to clarify any points or to bookmark.

User Requirement:

• User shall be able to annotate images or text
• User shall be able to annotate images or text

Question: What is meant by bookmarking? What can be bookmarked; a page, item or annotation?

Question: Where does the annotation take place; on the art item, discussion forum, online exhibition?

These links may be to semantic resources which provide detailed information related to the resource. Users will be able to annotate content on the platform with text or images. The text may be a URI in which case it should serve as a hyperlink. These links may be to semantic resources which provide detailed information related to the resource.

Additional Questions

1. There is no mention of how users will search for art items or exhibitions. Only searching the forum is mentioned. How does a user find art items or exhibitions?
2. Do the "Event" and "Exhibition" correspond to the same thing?
3. Is every art item part of an exhibition or can art items exist without an associated exhibition?
4. How will the bidding work? Should there be a way of stopping exploitations?
5. Should there be a user distinction as a regular user and an artist?