[ckan-discuss] Format / resource type dilemma

[David Read]

On 30 November 2011 11:23, Uros Milosevic <uros.milosevic at pupin.rs> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> My team and I at the Mihajlo Pupin Institute (Belgrade, Serbia) are working
> on establishing a Serbian open data catalog using CKAN.

Great to hear it Uros! It sounds like Mirko has made excellent
progress getting the Serbian translation into CKAN, for the benefit of
Serbian readers of CKAN servers everywhere.

> One of our use cases is related to publishing data from the Serbian National
> Statistics Office. We’re having troubles determining the appropriate values
> for the ‘Format’ and ‘Resource Type’ fields for our resources. Each resource
> is, basically, a page listing the statistical data with three links (above
> and below the table) for exporting the results to XML, XLS or PDF (e.g.
> http://bit.ly/vNNAwd). Is there a convention for describing such resource
> types? http://wiki.ckan.org/Domain_Model/Resource didn’t really help.
>
> Do you have any suggestions? Any help would be much appreciated.

It is great to see you have the data shown in web page tables - this
is good for wide accessibility of the numbers. But the most important
thing for newspapers, researchers etc. is the raw data in the XML and
XLS. Rather than simply link to your HTML page, we're very keen to see
direct links to these files of machine-readable data, helping efforts
to automate their analysis, comparisons, visualisations etc.

So I'd suggest you create a resource for each representation: HTML,
XML, XLS & PDF. I'd suggest formats: index/html, xml, xls, pdf
(extensions and mimetypes are both acceptable). I'm not sure about
'resource type'. No-one's used this field much yet I believe.

@Rufus can you say what the intention is for 'resource type'?

David

>
> Best,
> Uros Milosevic
>
>
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