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

Wed May 16 14:54:38 UTC 2012

Thank you very much, Sean, for this very detailed explanation. I  
appreciate that.

> CKAN currently has "activity streams" on user pages, that show
> everything the user has been doing on the site. [..]

Yes, I was wondering what this lonely history of a user is supposed to be  
good for.
But...

> Next we want to show a combined activity stream with all the activities
> from all the users and datasets that you're following, and show this to
> you when you login. This new activity stream should be quite easy to add
> on top of the activity streams and followers stuff that we've already
> implemented. Let me know if you'd be interested in implementing this
> feature, I think it will be a nice, fairly small task as an introduction
> to CKAN development and I could give you some guidance on how to
> implement it and review your code for you.

... that's great. I volunteer for it. :D
Can we liaise via Skype or the like in order not to flood the mailing list?
I'd like to start the development in the following week. Unfortunately, I  
have to spare much time to my other duties as a student and so, that won't  
be a full-time job. I hope that's no big problem.

> Here are tickets with more information about the Follow button and the
> combined activity stream (user stories, technical analysis, links to
> code implemented so far):
>
> http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/2304
> http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/2305
>
> We have not yet implemented my kind of email notification, but that of
> course could be added on top of the new activity stream, and we have
> done some analysis on how it could be implemented. Here's the ticket for
> it with more info:
>
> http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1635

I'm currently reading them through. Lots of nice ideas. I think we'll come  
back later to them when I am finished with the unified activity stream.

> We haven't implemented any support for following sets of users/datasets
> defined by search terms and as far as I know this isn't something we've
> considered.

This topic (following datasets by user-defined/chosen topics + bringing  
the full capacity of SPARQL-Queries to the user) is considered the  
research part of my thesis; so, I think I will try several approaches and  
evaluate them afterwards. I hope they and I will stand up to your  
appraisal. Nevertheless I am always open for suggestions and fresh ideas.

Best Regards,
Sven