[ckan-discuss] A few quick thoughts on data catalogue usability

Tue Sep 21 10:46:18 BST 2010

Tim,

Many thanks for your reflections on Government data and CKAN in
particular. I look forward to digesting the report at leisure, but
I'll quickly take on your specific comments about CKAN now.

Trackback links - that's a good idea in the 'social' vein. We've
experimented with comments, wikis, forums, ratingz etc., and this is
another one for us to try. I've added a ticket for it:
http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/trac/ticket/653

Easier wiki editing - I think this stems from the form looking being
quite different to the resulting package. Having a button to add some
info looks like it would only apply to the resources table which we
could do as a one off, but might just make the package view more
complicated. If people are worried by where/how to insert their new
data into the structure then maybe we should provide more help text,
or perhaps they should simply leave it in an unstructured comment?

Relationships - we're working on exactly this! Watch this space.

David

On 5 September 2010 11:17, Tim Davies <tim at practicalparticipation.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello all
>
> In the course of writing my dissertation about data.gov.uk (recently put an
> open copy up online here: http://bit.ly/bLgUFz) I had a few reflections
> about open data catalogues – jotted down below in case of use for CKAN.
>
>
>
> 1) Allowing some form of ‘track back’ against datasets
> When a non-technical user comes to look at a dataset it would be really
> useful for them to be able to see if anyone has created an interface /
> interpretation of it already.
>
>
>
> I found quite a few cases in research of end-users struggling to make sense
> of a dataset when good interfaces to that data had already been built and
> blogged about, but without there being any link from the dataset listing to
> those data uses.
>
>
>
> Accepting track backs could also make it easier for technical users to find
> blog posts / shared code etc. relating to a given dataset.
>
>
>
> 2) Make it easy to submit new meta-data from the front-end
>
> Going into the wiki-editing back-end of CKAN can be a bit daunting if you
> just have one extra bit of meta-data or info to add.
>
>
>
> What about having some sort of ‘Submit extra info’ box when viewing the
> dataset, with a drop-down of field-names, and a single field to give a
> value.
>
>
>
> I suspect that would make me more likely to submit extra info such as when I
> know a new version of a dataset is available but not in the CKAN listing.
>
>
>
> 3) Package relationships
>
> Many packages in a repository like data.gov.uk are in fact derivatives of
> other packages, or of not-yet-open datasets (e.g. lots of the school stats
> are extracts from a central database). Some way of indicating (and seeing)
> the relationship between packages would be useful.
>
>
>
> Hope these quick notes are useful in some way.
>
>
>
> All best wishes
>
>
>
> Tim
>
> _______________________________________________
> ckan-discuss mailing list
> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
>
>