[ckan-discuss] CKAN Wishlist

[Mark Wainwright]

Hi Lucy,

> If I have a wishlist for CKAN - where should I put comments?

This is quite a good place. If you have specific bug reports you can
also mail the ckan-dev list.

> 1) I'm currently trying to tidy up the OpenSpending group on the DataHub and
> it is quite laborious as I have to edit each package individually e.g.
> renaming the packages to reflect more accurately what is actually in them.
> What would be really nice is to have a Table View of Dataset Metadata which
> would give me the overview and be editable also.

Absolutely! By a spooky coincidence, only a few days ago, someone
wrote to the ckan-dev list to say that he'd written an extension to do
something very similar - see:

<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2012-February/001710.html>

I've suggested maybe this could be deployed on the Datahub at some
point, which would probably make your life easier if it were possible.

> 2) In order to clarify where the datasets are currently from, we are
> currently forcing metadata into the title
> e.g. http://thedatahub.org/dataset/edit/adur_district_spending prexied with
> UK. Maybe I am missing something, but is it possible to add geographical
> information and sort the contents of your group neatly by it? How to
> encourage people to do this so it doesn't become burdensome for one person
> always to fill in the missing info?

Not really at present - there are various ways search could be made
more powerful, and being able to configure the order of search results
is a good idea. But I see you are tagging the datasets with things
like 'country-uk' and 'regional', so provided you can persuade people
to use these tags consistently, you could use URLs like this to list
your regional UK datasets:

<http://thedatahub.org/group/openspending?tags=country-uk&tags=regional>

(Yes, the interface should provide a way to do this without hacking
the URL yourself - as far as I know it doesn't at the moment, but I
hope this is better than nothing.)

A recent and developing feature of CKAN is that it does have powerful
geo-spatial capabilities. However, at the moment the only interface to
these is via API calls. But watch this space - for a taster of what is
in store, see

<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2012-February/001699.html>

> 3) Is it possible to subscribe to a group? I would like to know when someone
> adds a new dataset to the group ready to import into OpenSpending to make
> sure as much of the req'd info is in there and help me to keep track of what
> we have in there.

'Activity streams' are a major very new feature which provide the
infrastructure for functionality like this, so the answer is that it
will be very soon.

Mark

-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
Skype: m.wainwright