What is a requirement?

Textual description, possibily with attributes. Author, owner, date of modification?

What is the content model (e.g., XHTML, plain text, anything)? Is there a role for content negotiation here? Could state management deal with "unfaithful" representations?

Other attributes: last modification time, life-cycle state (read-only etc).

Which attributes are mandatory, which optional, and what are their permitted values?

Can a PDF document be a requirement? What about a jpeg? If yes, can these content types be dealt with in the same way (attributes, links)?

What is a link?

Between a requirement and something else? How is that indicated?

Can a link have further links (e.g., to a change request)?

Is a link always valid? How would a user interrogate a link for validity? What other "state" does a link have?

Is a link uniquely defined by its endpoints? Mutiplicity?

Attributes on links (author, created data etc.)?

Link types - what are the permitted link types? Is this type system fixed and non-extensible or extensible? What link types do we want to support, and which are MUSTs, which are SHOULDs?

Is a link bi- or uni-directional? Is a link always unary or binary (what about a three-way link between a requirement, its decomposition, and a justification argument in the form of a UML model?)

Is there a need to represent a grouping of links along dimensions other than type?

API

Does it make sense to expose links without exposing requirements?

Should the API require that a client know the state of a requirement in order to add/remove a link? What about attributes? Should state management support the creation/removal of a link against a requirement which is read-only.

Use of ETags to help manage concurrency

Progressive disclosure - how much should a GET on a resource expose?

To what extent can OSLC be compatible with existing resource models and REST interfaces? Can we use content negotiation to keep OSLC and non-OSLC resource models distinct, or should resource URLs differ?

Given a URI, how does a client discover the things that can be done to that resource? (Embed services in representation? Allow content negotiation to fetch the service documents?)

How do we strive for evolvability of the resource model? What will break when we move to v2.0 of our effort?

-- IanGreen - 10 Aug 2009