[ckan-dev] Google's Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL)

Wed Mar 2 10:50:38 UTC 2011

Hi,

I recently posted to ckan-discuss about Google Public Data.

On a more technical note, just to make sure everyone's aware of this:

  http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/02/slicing-and-dicing-data-for-interactive.html
  http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/

This makes me think two things:

(1) It would be very interesting if we could think of simple ways to
help users of CKAN make a DSPL package with their data.  This would be
quite tricky to do in a generic sense, but for standard types of data
(e.g. things with postcodes, administrative regions, dates etc) we
could probably do some clever stuff to help out.  The benefit is huge:
lovely, interactive visualisations of the data embedded in the package
page.  I would love to have a stab at doing this some time.

(2) There is a potential "threat" from Google here.  What they are
building at http://www.google.com/publicdata/home, along with the
metadata provided by the DSPL format, clearly indicates a desire at
Google to move into the type of space currently occupied by CKAN.  Of
course, we focus on openness, open source software, etc, so it's not
necessarily much of an issue, but I think it's worth considering /
articulating how what we do is different from what they are doing /
planning to do.

Seb