[ckan-discuss] CKAN for researchers - enabling integration with downstream tools

[Tim McNamara]

I've just added a suggestion to Jonathan's ideas.okfn.org suggestion about
"#opendata for non-developers". In particular, whether it would be
worthwhile to fork the SOFA Statistics (http://sofastatistics.com)
application and add some integration with CKAN. The idea being that users
should be able to search for data, then have it automatically downloaded and
analyseable via SOFA.

SOFA isn't especially well-known, however it is excellent free software with
+50k installs and about 60% of its users list themselves as
"researchers/analysts".

I think that while SOFA isn't the biggest tool, building this sort of
support for free software is much easier than a proprietary statistical
product, like SPSS. Other free software targets include Weka (
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/) and R*.

Basically, I was thinking that it could be GUI on datapkg. Some possible
ideas:

 - ability to search CKAN instances (thedatahub.org by default?)
 - introspect packages and download supported formats

Comments welcome here on on the ideas page:
http://ideas.okfn.org/ideas/68/opendata-for-non-developers?page=1#195


* possibly some form of library that automatically takes data from a CKAN
instance and converts it into a data frame
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