[ckan-dev] Steve Yegge on Platforms

[David Read]

On 17 October 2011 14:13, Friedrich Lindenberg <
friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:

> Dear David,
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 11:18 AM, David Read <david.read at okfn.org> wrote:
> > Really interesting article - cheers for that. I'd agree it's good to have
> a
> > good API, although I'd say that Google have been pretty successful
> > generally, despite their poor APIs ;-)
>
> Yes, but the question is: how sustainable are sites like G+ when they
> fail to enable external innovation? This is kind of our key strength:
> there isn't even a strong distinction between the inside and the
> outside, so it can naturally happen.
>
> > I think you're being a little unfair on CKAN though, because the API has
> > given full access to the data since version 0.6, over three years ago.
> Sure,
> > we have had a few private services that manipulate that same data, such
> as
> > tag completion, but since these are trivial operations I don't see it as
> > much of a barrier. And we've also built a permissions model, which has
> not
> > had explicity APIs, but that is set to change:
> > Since the Spring we've been working to make channel our Web UI's
> > interactions with CKAN data via a new 'Logic Layer'. This is also exposed
> > *in full* to the world as the 'Action API'. This API has not been
> announced
> > yet, but a trial version went out last month in CKAN v1.4.3. Check out
> the
> > docs: http://readthedocs.org/docs/ckan/en/latest/apiv3.html It's
> designed to
> > be friendly to calling with javascript, so it's standard RPC, not onerous
> > and provides good status and error messages. It is also designed to
> return
> > help text (although there's not much there yet) and we have planned for
> it
> > to be discoverable too. So once we've got that, I think Steve Yegge would
> > approve.
>
> I didn't mean to imply that we had no API or that the API was bad (I
> do think we have a few long-standing kinks we need to address, but it
> has repeatedly proven very useful). Its just that visiting
> thedatahub.org, you'd have a hard time noticing it: the link is hidden
> in the footer and points to a somewhat chaotic wiki page which in turn
> only points to the older version of the API (I hadn't known the v3
> thing had docs, so that's my fault).
>

The v3 docs are new for this release. Thanks for reminding me to add them!

Important point about us advertising the API better. As a minor improvement,
I've added a more basic introduction and some examples to
http://wiki.ckan.org/API


> Maybe we could include ckanext-wordpresser on the main thedatahub.org
> site and link to some of the cool things that have already been done
> with the API, e.g. the LOD2 cloud, a writeup of harvesting, the UK25k
> collector, and the visualizations someone did for publicdata.eu.
> Particularly as the API starts to extend beyond metadata into data,
> this should become an impressive showcase and I'd love to contribute
> what I have (in terms of scripts running against webstore).
>

Great! Which PDEU visualisations? BTW are there are blog posts or slides
about WebStore I can advertise this week at OGD?

David


> We just need to make sure that we don't get all the cool features but
> nobody who's not on ckan-discuss knows about them.
>
> - Friedrich
>
> _______________________________________________
> ckan-dev mailing list
> ckan-dev at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/attachments/20111017/aeecdc78/attachment-0001.html>