[ckan-dev] Thoughts from places: open data workshop Berlin

Fri Dec 7 19:03:05 UTC 2012

Hi everyone,

this is just a list of input from the workshop at Fokus that I attended today. I met a lot of experienced, interested and motivated people and wanted to share some thoughts and ideas from discussions or things that came to my mind.

1. Spatial search terms

If someone searches for "Public transport islington", the search results should include results from London, even though the term "islington" never occurs in the metadata. In order to build this, we would need a service that provides alternative search terms up in the hierarchy ("London, UK, Europe" for Islington or "UK, Europe" for London) and a rating that prefers the the lower hierarchies so that you get the results for Islington (if available) and not the UK. 

2. Better CMS integration

It should be easier to create an open data site with more than just CKAN (i.e. a wiki, help pages, apps section,...).

3. conjunction (and)  instead f disjunction (or) in search

People asked for this change. However, I'm not sure whether this leads to better results since the search has a good rating but I would like to get some feedback on that.

4. Workshops

In a workshop, people building open data platform could talk to CKAN devs about questions they have or just hear about some best practices in an informal way. Also this could be a great way to get to know the community and hear about other projects with similar challenges and we could get a better idea of what people really need. I am not sure if workshops are possible but maybe we could have a regular (every two months or so) Hangout or something where CKAN devs and people who build open data platforms meet and chat for an hour. I'm not sure about the exact details but like the idea of connecting more to the users. 

5. Architecture overview

I would be great to have a visual overview of what CKAN is and what it offers for new CKAN devs or people who plan to use CKAN or explain its architecture (especially the logic layer). We probably need more than one visualization, though.

6. Best practices

I talked to two people from who war going to build the open data platform for the country of North Rhine Westphalia. They were really happy to hear about the best practices for CKAN+CMS and to see what CKAN 2.0 will offer. They plan to use Typo 3 together with CKAN. In order to help people like them to to convince others or just to know someone who has already made experience with a certain combination of CMS+CKAN, it would be awesome to have a list of sites and used software and maybe a contact. This could apply to the software for a CMS, authentication system or web server.

In general people are super happy with CKAN, value the great help from the community on the mailing list and the IRC and are excited about CKAN 2.0. People also use the term "CKAN standard" a lot. You guys should be proud of yourself!

Best wishes,
Dominik