[ckan-dev] Hiding groups on CKAN sites

Thu Apr 18 11:45:11 UTC 2013

> For most 'official' CKAN sites, groups don't make much sense. But if
> you look at other data portals, what a lot of them do have is 'themes'
> and the ability to search/facet by these - i.e. broad subject areas
> (using a vocabulary of their choosing). These are usually at least as
> prominent as publishers ('organizations', as we're calling them) and
> probably more useful in terms of people finding what they want.
> 
> If someone wanted to do that in CKAN, what would be the best way -
> would it be by renaming groups, or something else like fixed tag
> vocabularies?

Or just tags? I'm not sure, it depends on exactly how we want it to
work. Do you have links to any sites that have these features so we can
check them out? I think probably groups though...

Tags -- are out of control, anyone can add any tag to any dataset, and
anyone can make up new tags. A tag is just a word like "climate" etc.,
it does not have eg.  description and other fields.

Tag vocabularies -- are slightly more controlled than normal tags. You can
add a new field to datasets with a fixed number of options. So you could
add a "theme" field to the datasets on your site, with a fixed list of
different themes to choose from. Only a sysadmin can add new themes to
the list and they have to use the API to do so.

Groups -- are even more controlled than tag vocabularies. As with tag
vocabularies, we can restrict who can make new groups using auth
functions (not sure what the default permissions are). As with tags, a
dataset can belong to 0 or more groups (not just one). But I believe you
can also use group membership to restrict who is allowed to add datasets
to a group (which you cannot do with either tags or tag vocabularies, at
least not out-of-the-box). And there's even a nice web interface for
controlling the group members and admins and adding new groups, which
there isn't for tag vocabs. Also the group itself has other fields like
description and image, which tag vocabs don't.

So it seems like groups are probably the closest thing to the "themes"
that you're talking about.

We do, obviously, need clearer documentation about tags, vocabs, groups
and orgs in CKAN, exactly how each works and how they differ, what
use-case(s) each is intended for. The names of the features don't help
too much with this, but at this point renaming these features would be a
pain.