[ckan-discuss] Guidance for use of Author and Maintainer fields

[Richard Cyganiak]

Hi Glen,

Your mail went only to my address and not to the list; I'm replying to  
the list, assuming it was sent only to me in error.

On 27 Jul 2010, at 01:22, Glen Barnes wrote:
> Good point. I'm dealing with the same issue now migrating the New  
> Zealand Open Data Catalogue into the CKAN format.
>
> As another example I have this dataset:
>
> http://cat.open.org.nz/2010/04/13/auckland-google-transit-feed/
> Contact Name: Paul Montague
>
> Contact Phone: (09) 379 4422 x9072
>
> Contact Email Address: paul.montague at arta.co.nz
>
> And the 'owner' of the dataset is the Auckland Regional Transport  
> Authority.
>
> I think it would be good to review what the core fields are in the  
> dataset and then look at how we can tag additional fields that may  
> be common across instances.

+1.

I started to use a number of custom fields for the datasets that we're  
tracking for the Linking Open Data Cloud.

A first general question from my side would be, how to capitalize  
extension fields? And should words be separated by spaces, dashes,  
underscores? I've started to use all lower case with underscores,  
which looks great in the JSON output from the API, but slightly less  
great in the UI ;-) Should I go back and change these to something  
else? An example is "license_link" for custom licenses not covered in  
the Licenses dropdown on the package editing screen.

> Where would be the best place to start formulating these common tags?

Perhaps this wiki page should have a section on custom fields:
http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/doc/package

Rufus, is it ok if we just jump in here, add that section to that  
page, and just document a few extension fields that we find useful?

Or should we as a rule of thumb send such proposals to the list first,  
to see if there are objections?

Best,
Richard




>
> Glen
>
> On 27/07/2010, at 10:20 AM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking for some guidance on the use of the Author and  
>> Maintainer fields in CKAN.
>>
>> Often the author of a dataset is not an individual, but a group or  
>> organisation. Should I enter the name of the organisation in the  
>> Author field?
>>
>> What if the author is an organisation, but I also know the name and  
>> email of an individual who is particularly responsible for this  
>> dataset?
>>
>> Is there some convention for entering the organisation's (or  
>> individual's) homepage as well?
>>
>> Finally, what's the recommended use of the Maintainer field?
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>> Richard
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ckan-discuss mailing list
>> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
>