[ckan-dev] ckanext-spatial and pycsw synchronization workflow

Thu Nov 21 00:32:32 UTC 2013

Tom -

My approach does require a sync step, where a CKAN object is read from the database, passed through the Jinja template and the result is fed into a pycsw table. That pycsw table is in the same CKAN database, fwiw, but the table that pycsw reads from is not core-CKAN. 

An extension like ckanext-spatial can be configured to run that synchronization every time a dataset is updated, which makes the integration pretty seamless, even though its not quite as ideal as I think you're imagining.

One case to keep in mind: When records are harvested, the ideal CSW implementation will turn those harvested XML records around and provide them as GetRecordByID responses completely unedited. If the XML record is converted to a CKAN package during harvest, then that CKAN package is re-converted to XML on CSW request, there is pretty much no chance that the document will be the exact same as what was harvested. In that case, the approach CKAN currently takes is actually ideal. Then that leads you to, what do you do if a harvested record is edited in the CKAN interface?

The default criteria for a CKAN package is not sufficient to generate a valid ISO metadata record. I just generated this package: http://demo.ckan.org/dataset/minimum-content. I was required to enter two pieces of information: a title and a url. Here's the JSON serialization of that content: https://gist.github.com/rclark/7573839.

Thanks for keying me in here -- sorry that this conversation somehow slipped under my radar.

Ryan