[ckan-discuss] Package Relationships - remove?

Wed Aug 24 18:25:01 BST 2011

Hi,

I've got a proposal that we move away from the CKAN feature that
provides structured links between data packages - the Package
Relationships feature. I'd love to get some feedback on removing this
under-used feature.

This feature was implemented in the API 18 months ago, and although
several use cases were originally proposed, none have really taken
off. I understand the LOD people found it difficult to use, so simply
used Package Extra fields for describing the links between packages in
a flexible way.

This has put us off spending the time to create an edit interface in
the Web interface (but of course, maybe that has been the problem).
And it's not a simple part of our data model, requiring some work to
handle well in our RESTful API throughout the refactor, and yet some
issues remain which will require a chunk of further work.

So I'm suggesting we get rid of it and collect ideas for a future
replacement for forking/deriving/relating Resources instead, in a
Github-style way, as spreadsheets get cleaned up or extended etc.

More details of the use cases that have failed to take off are in the
CREP here: http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1289. Please do reply to this
list with any thoughts.

David