[ckan-discuss] Publishing to CKAN the Southampton Way

Thu Mar 10 15:16:57 GMT 2011

Rufus has asked me to drop into the list to share what we've done to 
integrate data.southampton.ac.uk into CKAN.

Our datasets have URI of the form
http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places
and HTML pages
http://data.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places.html
they also have the, now traditional range of linked data API options 
that aren't quite working yet for me.
http://data.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places.rdf
http://data.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places.xml
you know the kind of thing.

They also have a couple of unusual export views
http://data.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places.ckan.json
http://data.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/places.boilerplate.rdf

The first of these provides the JSON to inject into the CKAN API to 
update or create the dataset, the second generates the triples which get 
appended to the dataset each time it's published. (License etc.) The 
scripts which do this are actually entirely different from the ones 
which do places.html and there's .htaccess jiggerypokery, but the result 
seems more elegant to my sysprog eyes.

And of course; our scripts are available to all:
https://github.com/cgutteridge/Grinder/tree/master/bin

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/