[ckan-dev] VoID

[Timothy Lebo]

Ross,

I'd love if CKAN used VoID (or, DCAT) natively.

It certainly would help me access the listings in an arbitrary CKAN.

For example, it was a bit more difficult than we would have hoped for us to get the entries from http://hub.healthdata.gov/dataset (some notes at [1]).

It would have been great to just grab  http://hub.healthdata.gov/void.ttl and run with the RDF descriptions of all the datasets (some notes at [2]).
Or -- even better -- just conneg http://hub.healthdata.gov/dataset with an Accept: application/rdf+xml… (several other ways are mentioned in [2]).

Please note that W3C's DCAT [3] can be used to describe _any_ kind of dataset, not just RDF datasets.
We ended up crawling CKAN to produce DCAT entries for all of its datasets (notes at [4];  an example at [5] which includes W3C's PROV-O assertions at two levels).

I think VoID should be seen as a special case of DCAT, in the case where one has RDF datasets.

There are some nice features that VoID offers that DCAT does not (such as the "top level" http://hub.healthdata.gov/void.ttl file to "just get the listing"), and CKAN's needs could inspire the W3C GLD team to get them into DCAT, which is still in development.

Regards,
Tim Lebo

[1] https://github.com/jimmccusker/twc-healthdata/wiki/Accessing-CKAN-listings
[2] https://github.com/jimmccusker/twc-healthdata/wiki/Using-VoID-for-Accessibility
[3] http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/Data_Catalog_Vocabulary
[4] https://github.com/jimmccusker/twc-healthdata/wiki/Retrieving-CKAN%27s-Dataset-Distribution-Files
[5] https://github.com/jimmccusker/melagrid/blob/master/data/source/data-melagrid-org/e-geod-11584/access.ttl


On Feb 15, 2013, at 12:01 PM, Ross Jones <ross at servercode.co.uk> wrote:

> I've been looking at http://www.w3.org/TR/void/ and thought it might be worth taking a look at implementing it for CKAN as it has been asked for more than once, and seems like a useful way of finding the datasets that are available as RDF.
> 
> As CKAN doesn't really model the relationships between datasets, other than membership of groups, I wondered whether it would be enough for the void file to simply be a collection of void:Datasets so that at least it would aid in discovery via void.(rdf|ttl) even if it didn't attempt to describe the relationships between them?
> 
> Any suggestions, or general guidance appreciated.
> 
> Ross
> 
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