[ckan-dev] Authors / maintainers

Wed May 30 14:42:41 UTC 2012

Hello,

I have some comments to this. Adding a Publisher field to the CKAN is a
good idea but I would keep the Author/Owner of the data and the Maintainer
of the data as well. Actually we can have up to four roles and up to four
different persons or organizations acting in these roles – Owner of the
data, Maintainer of the data, Publisher of the data and Maintainer of the
CKAN data catalogue record. For example a ministry can own a dataset but it
can have it maintained by one of its agencies or one of the employees. The
ministry can have the dataset published by a central publishing agency and
some different ministry can maintain a data catalogue for the whole
government so they will create and maintain records in this catalogue.

I do not think that the creator of the CKAN dataset should default to the
owner. I agree that it can be handy in some use cases but not in the
example above because it will not be true in every case and the workers
creating CKAN records would have to change it on many occasions.

Better solution might be the CKAN package templates. It can be a simple
blank CKAN package with some prefilled values. You would be able to create
a template where owner defaults to the CKAN package creator but it will not
affect users not using this template. Package templates might be a valuable
tool for the managers of the authorisation groups because they would be
able to create templates which can help them to standardize package
description within the authorization group.

Best regards

Jan

2012/5/30 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>

> On 30 May 2012 12:46, Mark Wainwright <mark.wainwright at okfn.org> wrote:
> > Some thoughts about dataset author/maintainer.
> >
> > (1) While it might be useful for some cases, it seems just confusing
> > having these two fields by default. I would suggest instead that the
> > default be to have one field ('Maintainer'), with an option to add
> > extra maintainers (in the same way as one adds extra fields).
>
> From conversations and experience over the year we should probably
> just have Publisher (and perhaps Maintainer)
>
> > (2) At present there is no maintainer (/author) until you go to the
> > 'further information' tab and type it in. I'd like to see a checkbox
> > when the data is created called 'I am the maintainer of this dataset',
> > which autofills my details in as the main contact (assuming I'm logged
> > in).
>
> I think we should at least see CKAN owner shown as "CKAN owner" in some
> way.
>
> > (3) If a dataset has no resources the resources list currently says
> > '(none)'. Here is a suggested improvement: 'There are no data
> > resources here yet. For information about this data, contact the
> > dataset maintainer.'
>
> Agreed. These are the kind of UX tweaks that really should go into
> tickes. We already have quite a lot of them ;-)
>
> > The idea of (2) and (3) is to make it as easy as possible for someone
> > holding some data to make a minimal useful dataset for it. For
> > whatever reason, they don't want to put it online at the moment, but
> > they can still register the fact that they have it in about a minute
> > by creating an empty dataset for it.
>
> Understood. This is more the catalog approach. I'm a little dubious of
> its value unless I can do something else like "Request access to this
> dataset". Having a bunch of datasets without any data reduces the
> value of a given instance I think.
>
> Rufus
>
> > Any thoughts? I can make this a ticket if there aren't howls of protest.
>
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