[ckan-discuss] Questions and comments about package/group maintenance

[Richard Cyganiak]

Hi,

A few comments and questions on ckan.net, from a package/group  
maintainer's point of view.

Comment: Adding a package to a group should be possible from the  
package's page. Currently one has to go to the group page and click  
"edit", then copy-paste the package name into a field. That's  
inconvenient.

Comment: The search box should be accessible from every page, not just  
from the home page. The extra click becomes quite annoying when one  
has to search a lot. (Or please at least place a "search" link  
somewhere on every page.)

Question: Are there guidelines for naming packages? Around  
capitalization, abbreviations, what to put in or leave out?

Question: How to treat packages where the data is originally created  
by one party, then re-packaged in a different format elsewhere on the  
web by another party? That's quite a common case in the RDF/LOD world.  
In several cases, the same data has even been re-packaged multiple  
times by different parties. Should I create a package for the original  
data and one for (each of) the re-packaged version(s)? How do I  
indicate the original source?

Question: A lot of the tags used in ckan.net appear to have very  
specific meaning (todo.list-datasets, access-bulk, access-registration  
and so on). Are the meaning of these tags documented somewhere? I want  
to correctly categorize packages that I create, but I find it  
difficult because I don't know what tags to use.

Question: Is there a convention for specifying the date when a package  
(or rather the data in the package) has been last modified?

Question: For packages whose data is accessible via a SPARQL endpoint,  
I'd like to add the SPARQL endpoint URL to the ckan.net package  
information. Is there an existing convention for this? Should I add a  
custom URL with format="sparql", description="SPARQL endpoint"?

Comment: In general, it seems like package and group maintainers must  
follow quite a large number of conventions for ckan.net to be really  
useful. I would have expected some documentation on this in the user  
guide, but couldn't find much of help. I think this area of the  
documentation needs work.

All the best,
Richard