[ckan-discuss] Formal statement of CKAN's adoption of W3C DCAT?

Fri Nov 15 17:04:17 UTC 2013

Hi John and others,

There is no statwment that I can point you unfortunately, but I can
give you a summary of how do we see things going forwards on CKAN +
DCAT.

The main area where we are focusing on DCAT is on providing a simple
catalog interop interface to share metadata between catalogs (which I
guess is the whole point of DCAT). Here is a draft document that
describes this proposal and how DCAT is used to serialize dataset
metadata (with still some work to be done). Please leave feedback or
comments if you want:

https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1JFgk-U7so4V0aecut53JS2GPtI2tgFMShUvLoINyKQY/edit#heading=h.mqilpto87tiu

ckanext-dcat is basically the CKAN implementation of this proposal,
offering the ability to both expose the metadata in a DCAT dump and
harvest from other catalogs offering this dump.

See further comments below:

On 15 November 2013 08:08, Jesús Redondo <redondogarciajesus at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am also interested in a CKAN with fully implementation of DCAT, and with
> more customization . Right now CKAN only provides metadata about their
> datasets and their distributions, (there is not metadata about the catalog
> itself).
This is one of the items to discuss on the document linked above. It
should be relatively easy to add catalog metadata, but what is you use
case for this?

> The DCAT metadata is alterable by using the file: "read.rdf",
> located in: "(ckan
> location)/default/src/ckan/ckan/templates_legacy/package/".
Yes, you can customize the dataset.rdf output by overriding this file
on your extension (on the templates/package/read.rdf directory)

> The syntax used to configure the metadata output it is not particularly
> easy. Take a look to this
> (http://docs.ckan.org/en/847-new-theming-docs/template-helper-functions.html),
> because some of the functions used in the config file are there. Still I
> miss some functionalities, for example something that provides the size of
> one file, so you can use dcat:bytesize.
I think you can use h.localised_filesize(), but I'm not sure from what
CKAN version this is available

> I am working right now to configure the DCAT metadata of my CKAN instance,
> and at the same time I am waiting for some kind of upgrade to the
> ckanext-dcat that could make this task easier.
There is an issue on ckanext-dcat to see how we should handle this
xml/rdf file going forward. I suspect that the default rdf template
will be rewritten a bit.
Could you add there what kind of features would you want? That would
be very useful.

> Probably someone with more experience could give you more insight!
>
> Jesús
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 4:24 PM, John Erickson <erickj4 at rpi.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Can someone point me to some statement that describes CKAN's level of
>> adoption of W3C CKAN?
>>
>> I do know about ckanext-dcat https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-dcat but
>> that doesn't provide a high-level position.
>>
>> Alternatively (or in addition), I would love to hear from "owners" of
>> individual CKAN
>> instances who have implemented (in some way) DCAT.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> --
>> John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
>> Director, Web Science Operations
>> Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
>> <http://tw.rpi.edu> <erickj4 at rpi.edu>
>> Twitter & Skype: olyerickson
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