[ckan-dev] ckanext-archiver/qa upgraded

Wed Jan 27 17:31:53 UTC 2016

Excellent work, thanks for coordinating this David and to all
contributors from around the world!

Adrià

On 27 January 2016 at 16:20, David Read <david.read at hackneyworkshop.com> wrote:
> Popular CKAN extensions 'Archiver' and 'QA' have recently been
> significantly upgraded. Now it is relatively simple to add automatic
> broken link checking and 5 stars of openness grading to any CKAN site.
> At a time when many open data portals suffer from quality problems,
> adding these reports make it easy to identify the problems and get
> credit when they are resolved.
>
> Whilst these extensions have been around for a few years, most of the
> development has been on forks, whilst the core has been languishing.
> In the past couple of months there has been a big push to merge all
> the efforts from US (data.gov), Finland, Greece, Slovakia and
> Netherlands, and particularly those from UK (data.gov.uk), into core.
> It's been a big leap forward in functionality. Now installers no
> longer need to customize templates - you get details of broken links
> and 5 stars shown on every dataset simply by installing and
> configuring the extensions. And now we're all on the same page, it
> means we can work together better from now on.
>
> The Archiver Extension regularly tries out all datasets' data links to
> see if they are still working. File URLs that do work are downloaded
> and the user is offered the 'cached' copy. Otherwise, URLs that are
> broken are marked in red and listed in a report. See more:
> ckanext-archiver repo, docs and demo images -
> https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-archiver
>
> The QA Extension analyses the data files that Archiver has downloaded
> to reliably determine their format - CSV, XLS, PDF, etc, rather than
> trusting the format that the publisher has said they are. This
> information is combined with the data license and whether the data is
> currently accessible to give a rating out of 5 according to Tim
> Berners-Lee's 5 Stars of Openness. A file that has no open licence, or
> is not available gets 0 stars. If it passes those tests but is only a
> PDF then it gets 1 star. A machine-readable but proprietry format like
> XLS gets it 2 stars, and an open format like CSV gets it 3 stars. 4
> and 5 star data is that which uses standard schemas and references
> other datasets, which tends to mean RDF. See ckanext-qa repo, docs and
> demo images - https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-qa
>
> David
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