[ckan-dev] Master's thesis and personalization of CKAN

Fri May 11 12:05:24 UTC 2012

Hello everyone,

I'd like to introduce myself to the CKAN developer team. I am Sven and  
study computer science (specialization in the field of data and web  
engineering) at the Chemnitz University of Technology. I decided to write  
my Master's thesis under supervision of Dr. Sören Auer who introduced me  
to CKAN.

The topic of the thesis is "A concept to personalize dataset repositories  
using the example of CKAN". Thus, I'd like to add functionality to enable  
the users to follow their personal interests more easily and faster;  
regarding data repositories to follow the data which they are primarily  
interested in.

One step towards that is the already implemented extension to follow  
selected datasets (Irina told us that Darwin is in charge of it). Maybe  
that's the first point for me to hook into.

Here a short summary of the thoughts we'd like to implement:

active parts for the users; their efforts:
- to follow a group of datasets
- to follow a set of datasets defined by search terms/tags/other meta-data  
like LODStats
- to follow people << maybe friends
[- to follow a dataset as the base functionality]

- to configure whether or not to be informed and if so which media shall  
be used for which kind of changes/"follows"/etc.

passive parts for the users; their benefits:
- being notified by email in case of changes
- being informed by an activity stream on the homepage right after logging  
in to CKAN (bringing the activity stream to the fore in order to provide  
an on-the-glance view of the users' latest news)

Currently, I am not aware of which particular feature has been already  
implemented or not.
So, thank you in advance for your contribution and I look forward to  
hearing your ideas, advices, improvements etc.

Best regards,
Sven