[ckan-discuss] City-specific data

[Jo Walsh]

hi Jason,

On 18/02/2011 12:36, Jason Kitcat wrote:
> There's a burgeoning Open Data movement in Brighton& Hove and
> they're  gearing up to start cataloguing what open data is already out there.

Sounds great! Hugh Glaser was talking about something similar for  
Southampton at the workshop at dev8d yesterday.
( http://ckan.okfnpad.org/tutorial - walkthrough and notes)

> I'd like to encourage the use of CKAN for that process - what is the
> best way to get city specific data in there which at one time they want
> to build a snazzy Brighton& Hove specific front-end for?
>
> Is it about using a specific tag, or group or something else?

Hugh was asking similar questions - should a city set up its own CKAN  
instance (in which case does OKF offer hosting and on what terms?), or  
are people encouraged to use the central ckan.net?

Based on fairly limited experience I would say; start with a tag,  
rather than a group, as the group functions still need some work to be  
user-friendly (e.g. one has to be a member of a group to add packages  
to it, but it's not clear that this is the case, or obvious how to  
join a group). Starting with a tag on the main ckan.net is a way to  
get going very quickly; then set up a group later, and if a dedicated  
CKAN instance is required, then easy to migrate the data over using  
the API.

Another option later on could be to make a completely customised  
snazzy front-end, just using CKAN via the API, based on Drupal or  
building on the Javascript interface that Rufus started,  
http://rufuspollock.org/code/ckanjs/

As this is something that a few people seem to be asking perhaps it  
should be in the FAQ: http://wiki.ckan.net/FAQ

And there are more questions, i suppose, about harvesting or  
cross-searching different instances of CKAN (of which there are so  
many now,
http://wiki.ckan.net/Instances


jo
-- 
Jo Walsh

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