Requirements and Specification Exemplars

Page 12 meeting initiator. For instance, the meeting chair and secretary must be present; they have the highest participant importance. In a project meeting where specific tasks are discussed, task leaders would have a higher importance than normal project members and a lower importance than the meeting chair, the task speakers or the project reviewers. Meeting Significance. The meeting significance represents the importance for a specific person to attend a particular meeting relatively to other meetings or meeting requests. Meeting significances are typically determined by the participants concerned. For instance, participants to a specific task in a research project would assign a greater significance to a project meeting where their task will be discussed. This information must be kept confidential. Participant Flexibility. The participant flexibility is intended to indicate how easily a user can make a particular date interval free to allow meetings to be scheduled within that interval. Dates in exclusion sets and/or preference sets can thus be weighted accordingly. The participant flexibility is typically determined by the participants concerned. For instance, professors cannot move lecture periods easily; their participant flexibility for the corresponding date intervals should be low. A date interval which is not in the exclusion set of a participant should have a high flexibility for that participant. This information must be kept confidential. Using Knowledge about Status and Priorities. The following tactics illustrate some typical uses of the various kinds of priorities suggested above.-Best meeting dates and locations should be determined by considering participants with higher participant status first.-If no date can be found to organize a meeting, the system could propose a person having low participant importance to withdraw from the meeting.-If no date can be found to organize a meeting, the system could propose a participant to cancel (or to withdraw from) another meeting having a lower meeting significance.-A meeting date within some exclusion set (or outside some preference set) could be considered if the corresponding participant has a high flexibility for it.