[ckan-discuss] distributing changes and syncing instances

Wed Mar 17 12:22:22 GMT 2010

Hi all,

>> Our current analysis is here:
>> http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/trac/wiki/DistributingChanges

Two thoughts:

- I don't know if this has been discussed previously, but after
researching OAI-PMH (http://www.openarchives.org/) for a bit, I feel
like there is a lot of functional overlap here. The protocol is
non-REST, overengineered and it does not have native support for
versioning, yet it is widely accepted and supported (DSpace and most
other OA servers, Google Scholar, etc.).

PMH could easily be extended to include both CKAN-specific XML data
and VDM (?) versioning info while maintaining backwards compatibility
to generic bibliographies. While I am not sure whether this would be
suitable as the sole CKAN-to-CKAN replication mechanism, maybe it
could be a nice byproduct of that effort. The pyoai Client/Server
library seems very comprehensive and there are some examples of F/OSS
Python OAI servers.

- There seems to be a lot of interesting work going on wrt replication
in CouchDB. While adopting their technology for package data storage
(instead of SQL) is probably overkill, maybe there are some abstract
ideas we could ... inherit?

> I've started a more formal RFC-like document aimed at generalising the
> protocol beyond the CKAN here:
>
>  <http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/hg/file/tip/doc/distributed.rst>

Can't access that, are you sure you have pushed it?

Cheers, Friedrich