[ckan-discuss] Publishing to CKAN the Southampton Way

[Rufus Pollock]

On 10 March 2011 15:16, Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> Rufus has asked me to drop into the list to share what we've done to
> integrate data.southampton.ac.uk into CKAN.

I think this is really exciting Chris and thanks for posting to the list.

> 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.

Understood -- the point is you are always appending some standard set
of attributes (e.g. your standard license) when exporting to CKAN.

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

Thanks a lot. Do you have any feedback (positive or negative) on the
API based on your experience using it?

I'm also interested because it seems one could generalize this
approach for other people publishing data -- another approach is a
pull model in which CKAN harvests data from your end (given a
harvesting endpoint ...)

Rufus