Following are some use cases for a theoretical system that would allow PTKContent to be rated by portal members. Rating would be a complement to discussions, enabling members to share their thoughts about content in a quantitative manner.

Actors

Manager (Reviewer)

Member

Reviewer Creates Criterion

Goal

Give members a common criterion for rating content

Description

From a screen (not yet existing within PTK) similar to an object's properties screen, Reviewers have the ability to add a new criterion for a particular content type.

For any given criterion, a reviewer submits a label, a short description of the criterion, and a numerical range for members' ratings.

After you create a criterion for a content type, members will have an opportunity to rate objects of the type in question based on your criteria.

Member Rates Item

Goal

Share with the community a quantitative impression of how portal content meets one or more criteria.

Description

If you are viewing a portal content item of a type for which a reviewer has established one or more criteria, an action will appear in your actions menu which reads "Rate this item".

Clicking on this link will take you to a screen which displays all criteria available for the content type in question, as well as an input allowing you to set numerical ratings for each criterion.

Clicking the button reading "Enter my ratings" will factor your rating(s) into the average rating(s) for the object.

Member Views Item Ratings

Goal

Discover how other members rated a content item.

Description

For any item which has been rated against one or more criteria, there will be a way of discovering the average rating for that object, which represents the average of all member ratings for that object.

Member Views Collection of Rated Items

Goal

View a collection of rated items sorted by rating for a particular criterion

Description

If you are viewing an object which represents a collection of items (folder, search return, etc), some of which have been member-rated, you may sort objects based on the average ratings for a particular criterion.

Scenario - Knowledge Base

A rating system as described in this document could be used to implement some common features of a 'knowledge base':

An online community with a large number of HOWTO's wants to allow members rate the helpfulness of individual HOWTO's and browse a collection of HOWTO's based on how helpful they were to other members.

The reviewers for this community create a criterion labelled helpfulness, with a short description How helpful was this item?, and a numerical range of 1-10.

Joe User visits the site, trying to determine how to install foo in bar. Searching on the key words foo bar returns Joe a list of documents which contained the strings in question; these results are automatically sorted by helpfulness (optionally, Joe could be allowed to specify a sort order, and helpfulness could be one of the factors in that sort).

Joe finds a document which is very helpful in guiding him through the process of installing foo in bar, and so he rates this item a 10 for helpfulness.

Glossary

Rating

An individual member's quantitave impression of how an object meets a particular criterion.

Average Rating

The numerical average of all ratings for a particular criterion for a particular object.