[ckan-discuss] Fwd: Some Feedback on CKAN

Thu May 19 01:59:29 BST 2011

Thanks for your input Mark, I think this is very useful. Your impressions
concur with my initial ones.

One of the difficulties with CKAN.net is that it doesn't have a defined
target market. It's necessarily general in which data are included. I
wonder, however if we could do something similar to what you're suggesting
for our landing page.

Please excuse the ASCII wireframe:

==================
CKAN: the data hub
==================

    ADD DATA         [http://                            ] [submit]

WHO IS THIS FOR?      LATEST DATA                WHY OPEN DATA?

[For scientists]      *dataset 1*                 -  .......  ...
[For librarians]       .....   ...  .........        ..   .....
[For analysts  ]                                  -  ....   ....
[For officials ]      *dataset 2*                 -  ..   .......
[For designers ]       ....  ......   .......
                       ..........  ..   .....

On 2 March 2011 01:58, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:

> Some really useful feedback from Mark Hahnel of Science 3.0 / FigShare
> with whom I had a very good chat last week. (Mark tried sending direct
> but the email kept disappearing -- if anyone else encounters this
> please let me know).
>
> One of the key things I got from chatting with Mark was the importance
> of providing ultra-simple mini-gateways into a CKAN instance oriented
> to a specific community.
>
> I'm wondering if we can work on groups to deliver this sort of feature
> -- groups already provide a way for a given group / community of
> people to have a bespoke web page and list of datasets but we could
> add to this, for example by providing a default search box that just
> searches a groups datasets.
>
> Rufus
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Hahnel, Mark
> Sent: 28 February 2011 18:55
> To: ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> Subject: Feedback
>
> Dear CKAN team,
>
> I am writing to offer some feedback with regards to how I view
> http://ckan.net/ -This is a follow up to a conversation I had with
> Rufus and he suggested I should pass these opinions on to the whole
> group.
>
> As a practising scientist, the front end of the site does not make
> uploading data easy for me. In that, I’m a little confused as to who
> the site is for, can I use it? Ie. There is no mention of what types
> of data are being uploaded and whether scientific data is suitable. I
> only find science related stuff if I search ‘science’, so maybe
> something along the lines of, “What subject are you looking for data
> on?” is needed.
>
> We spoke with reference to http://FigShare.com which is offering a
> service with a lot of overlap, it’s still being developed as a micro
> publishing platform for scientists to share all of their data,
> including the rarely published/still important negative data. So the
> target audience here is your average researcher. Hopefully we’ll
> generate a good dataset which can go into CKAN.
>
> But my point here is the average researcher, the people from my field
> with the data needs to be spoon fed into uploading data. They’d need
> to see something saying ‘scientists click here’...now what...’upload
> your data or search the available data’. And then when they do want to
> upload they/we again need it simple. Is all the meta data necessary,
> could that not be optional following a simple ‘addition of a dataset’?
> I suppose it depends what the overall goal is. If you want linked data
> in a standardised form, then I understand. But personally I feel
> acquisition of data in any form should be the priority. The power of
> the platform lies in the API, and the subsequent analysis of the data.
>
> When it comes to data uploading, the average researcher would not know
> which license to put their data under and they do not have the time to
> research which one it should be. Especially not all 75 that you have
> an option of on the CKAN data upload form. Due to the legal
> connotations of a ‘license’ I think this question might be enough to
> put a lot of my colleagues off and this could be the point that their
> data upload ends. I don’t even know what the ‘extras’ are for and I
> like to think that I’m quite well versed in this kind of thing.
>
> My second point is incentives. I know about the benefits of open
> access etc but a lot of people do not, again it needs to be spoon fed,
> “WHY should I do this” – Maybe even have a tab saying this. All we get
> is “CKAN makes it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data,
> especially in ways that are machine automatable.” – Is this a good
> thing? How can I personally benefit from spending 5 minutes of my
> precious time doing this?
>
> I should note that Rufus has since made a few changes which may have
> corrected some of the things I’m referring to. I should also note that
> I am aware that this is just the viewpoint from one angle and that the
> site is for many types of data, each of which will have different
> specs. These are not complaints, I love what OKFN and CKAN are doing,
> I’m just trying to help.
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> Mark Hahnel.
>
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> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
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>
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