Case Study FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What do we do with the case study ideas we receive?

- Cases with STSM opportunities should be entered on the wiki at http://fp0804.emu.ee/wiki/index.php/Category:STSM_Opportunity

Please try entering this one and give any comments on the process back to the group.

- For cases generally, my idea was to create a semantic form similar to what is being developed for the DSS, but this will take some time to develop. In the meantime, maybe we can just post them directly to the standard wiki. I added a subcategory to Category:Case Studies that is Category:Forsys Case Studies (but I don't think this is quite the right strategy). I think it may be important to somehow separate cases that Forsys participants plan to use to contribute towards the project guidelines from general cases in the literature, but I'm not sure how - see next issue.

Do we separate cases from Forsys participants from cases from the literature?

- Luc argues: Assuming institutionalization of the wiki and not of the Cost Action per se, it does not matter whether a forsys member has delivered a case or a case study. Of course it does for the record of the Action, so a separate tag “Forsys member” should do.

- This is a good point. My initial thinking is that these will be stored in different data structures: the wiki for forsys cases and a literature database (maybe Mendeley.com for the literature). However, somehow we would need to link from each to the guidelines they relate to.

How to we tag/categorize the cases?

- Luc comments: I am not a tagging expert but it seems to me that tags need to be smaller than “Cases of participatory planning in forestry”. The point is modularity. So “case study” is enough for a case study. And “case” is enough for a case. (without describing the study –methodology, theory- behind it). Then “participation” is another tag.

I generally agree, but there do seem to be some differences between wiki categories and keywords more generally (I’m just learning). The fundamental difference is that I don’t see a way to use multiple wiki categories at once to find, for example, all “cases” with “participation”. I think this leads to the use of long categories involving multiple concepts. Also, wiki categories are used as the title of pages and longer ones are helpful for this. As we move to the semantic wiki, it looks like the modular approach will be better.