[ckan-discuss] ckan.net linking open data group and lod cloud

[William Waites]

On 10-04-26 18:13, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 25 April 2010 21:24, Richard Cyganiak <richard at cyganiak.de> wrote:
>
>> This is probably the right model for an environment where strict quality
>> control is necessary (e.g., program code, where a bad change breaks the
>> build, causes bugs, and is a security problem). In a wiki, a spirit of "just
>> do it, it can always be reverted" is more appropriate. Now, CKAN is
>> somewhere in the middle -- currently probably closer to a wiki with imposed
>> structure, but in the long term you probably want much more automated
>> processing to happen around your data. So the patch queue model might be the
>> right one.
> 
> Sounds sensible. One point about this is we already have quite a bit
> of the potential infrastructure for this in place at the moment with
> the Changeset/Revision model but work would be needed to put this in
> the user interface.

Tatiana and I were also talking about this yesterday as far as how to
process changesets (for the bibliographica project, but using the same
4store + pylons stuff as semantic.ckan.net). One idea was to have a flag
on the user ("admin" or "trusted" or something). If such a user makes a
change, the changeset is applied. If someone else makes a change the
changeset is queued. Some process for applying the queued changesets
needs to be worked out.

This is quite aside from mainline ckan, however.

> I'm also thinking it might be nice to hack a bit of an RDF hack in
> CKAN extra fields to have a set of existing RDF prefixes (dc, dct,
> void etc) which could be use in Extra Keys.
> 

This is the strategy that we took with our recent mongo+rdf experiment
and worked well enough. It would certainly be helpful to do this. Right
now the script that generates RDF from the ckan API has a bunch of
special cases for at least the data.gov.uk extras which is not terribly
elegant.

>>> also, before you ask, we have been
>>> thinking hard about moving ckan.net to a full RDF store backend
>>
>> I don't really care what you use under the hood as long as there's some RDF
>> on the surface. If you have a fixed schema, there's limited value in moving
>> the backend to an RDF store.
> 
> Right :) Well's there definitely RDF on the surface!
> 

It will help in a lot of ways I think, but there is still quite a lot of
development to be done. Trying to do it in a generic enough way that it
can be used for different projects.

Cheers,
-w


-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK