[ckan-dev] Authors / maintainers

[Mark Wainwright]

I guess Jan's example shows the importance of being able to tweak the
metadata schema, since surely not everyone needs four separate fields
here. But we're talking about a default.

I see the value of distinguishing the actual data owner (or publisher
or whatever) from the person maintaining the CKAN record (maintainer /
CKAN owner), as Jan and Rufus suggest. So I'll make a ticket proposing
the following:

* Changing the '(none)' message as I suggested.

* Keeping the current fields but renaming 'author' to 'owner', and
having more helpful explanatory text. At present, the author is 'the
main contact' and maintainer is 'another important contact' - I'll
suggest wording that differentiates the roles.

* Inserting the user's details as Maintainer by default, controlled by
a check-box when creating the dataset.

As Jan says this may not always be true, but then it's easy to uncheck the box.

Mark


On 30 May 2012 15:42, Jan Kučera <elquenor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
CKAN on Twitter: @CKANproject