Preserving State Government Digital Information:
Pilot Project Meetings
Overview
The Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) is working with developers from Syntactica on the NDIIPP pilot project. Syntactica is creating an integration architecture to support the business goals of this project. The first phase is to analyze business requirements and to study architectural tradeoffs. They intend to build proof-of-concept architecture applications that demonstrate architectural tradeoffs. Providing users with web interfaces and APIs (service interfaces) is one important goal. The diagram below outlines the current draft for the project.
For more information about the Pilot Project, please contact:
Carol Kussmann at Carol.Kussmann@mnhs.org
August 19, 2009 Meeting Summary
An initial meeting to discuss the overall architecture needed for the database application. Discussion of expected deliverables including a High-Level Needs Analysis; Statement of High-Level Architectural Requirements; Architectures Tradeoff Modeling Session; Proof of Architecture Application Portfolio; Application Creation and Testing; and the Architectural Evaluation Report. Many of these things need to be discussed and created before the actual development will begin. Documentation of the entire process will be very important.
August 26, 2009 Meeting Summary
Staff from the Minnesota Revisor's Office joined MHS and Syntactica for this meeting to discuss further system requirements. The Revisor's Office shared an outline for work to consider when developing this pilot. At least 50% of the items fall into the project's first phase. The remainder if not added into this first phase will become goals for future developments. Some of the requirements that were discussed included system documentation, acceptable data types, importing and exporting features, and search capabilities.
Syntactica created an initial list of Architecturally Significant requirements that MHS staff will review and comment on. These comments will be taken into consideration when Syntactica provides MHS with the Statement of High-Level Architectural Requirements. After being approved, this Statement of High-Level Architectural Requirements will be used by Syntactica to focus on the most important system requirements.
September 18, 2009 Meeting Summary
Syntactica presented an architectural tradeoff of four different system architectures: 1) a traditional relational database, 2) a native XML system, 3) a document search and retrieval system, and 4) a hybrid system that might use both document search and SQL for metadata.
The architecturally significant requirements previously ranked as Critical, Very High, High, and Medium by MHS staff were scored using a five point scale and then weighted based on how critical they were to the overall success of the project using 100% for Critical, 75% for Very High, 50% for High, and 25% for Medium. The total scores for each system architecture follow:
1) Relational Database: 19
2) Native XML System: 40
3) Document Management System: 24.75
4) Hybrid: 33
This was followed by a general discussion of architecture quality attributes.
September 24, 2009
