[ckan-dev] New to the list; academic project making CKAN extensions

Tue Nov 3 19:30:02 UTC 2015

Hi Matt,

> On 3 Nov 2015, at 19:06, Matthew Cleinman <mcleinma at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> ·         Adding metadata for the actual dataset into CKAN.  This data dictionary would have information about every field in the set – name, alias, type, description.  (Currently, Philadelphia often has one data source in CKAN that is the metadata for the data set.  This would allow CKAN to handle the metadata directly.)

It'll probably save you a little time to be aware of the work being done around datapackages and the JSON Table Schema.  There's a PR in progress to describe it at https://github.com/ckan/ideas-and-roadmap/pull/160 and you can find the datapackage/JTS specs at http://dataprotocols.org - seems like it would be better if everyone heads in the same direction with this - not least because it'll allow for fixing the datapusher :) 

> ·         Adding another grouping/dimension for data sources within a dataset.  For instance, when the city has multiple data sources for a data set that span multiple years, they manually add a year in the data source name: https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/city-council-districts.  This extension would allow CKAN to logically group the data sources from each year, presenting a cleaner interface to the user and another (optional) level of organization for the admin.

We do this on data.gov.uk, you can see it at https://data.gov.uk/dataset/council-spending-over-500 (although the UI with the expandos is likely to change).  Would love to see this implemented in a separate extension though.

Looking forward to it, do come and hang out on IRC (#ckan on freenode) if you get a chance.

Cheers

Ross