3. NATURE OF A SOURCE CASE AND ITS VIEWS

A “source case” can be almost anything: direct personal experience; a chapter from a book; an article from a journal or encyclopedia; an interview with a public administrator; a news story or editorial; sets of regulations; and even analogies with, say, genetic and chemical life characteristics. Naturally, these have different degrees of accuracy and validity, but that is for you, the contributor and/or user, to judge, just like you would do when faced naturally with a variety of inputs like those above.

There currently (December, 2011) are about 80 source cases in COMPASS (67 of which are on the web). These are comprised of about 14,000 variables (operons); 15,000 bivariate (one dependent variable – Y -- coupled with one independent – X) relationships (kineses); and 5000 unique single-word topics (cistrons).

Source cases can come in five different "views". Small cases (of the type described most fully in this manual) usually have a view with their own workspace (wiki) with one variable per web page. A "causal diagram" (another view) also can be a web page in this larger view.

Larger cases can have a "variables in a list" view; a "variables in categories" view, wherein all the variables (operons) are shown categorized in a given classification system. And/or, the variables (operons) may be shown in a "variables in relationships" view with their respective influencing variables (if any). In these latter three views the source case is represented in just one web page of a single (big) wiki. See http://compassvarlists.pbworks.com, http://compassvariablesincategories.pbworks.com,and http://compasscases.pbworks.com, respectively.

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