[ckan-discuss] Introducing Odessa, a CKAN metadata repository

Thu Oct 24 10:29:55 BST 2013

Hi all,

This sounds like a really interesting project. Open data portals are
only any use if people can and do use the data, and anything which
makes that significantly easier is a great addition to the landscape.
If CKAN is useful to help build it, that's a bonus :-)

Martin Keegan started working on a similar project[1] last year, but I
don't think it's active at the moment.

I'm hoping to meet up and chat with Brian on Saturday while he's in Cambridge.

Mark

[1] http://blog.ucant.org/?p=393

On 22/10/2013, Brian Lee Yung Rowe <rowe at muxspace.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a relative newcomer to the open data world. I have a background in
> quantitative analysis (mostly in finance) and am a professor in a graduate
> program for data analytics. I've been watching the growth of open data with
> interest as the potential for conducting useful and interesting research
> with all this data is quite compelling. With so many repositories offering
> data, finding data is no longer the challenge it used to be. Instead the
> challenges I've had with actually using the data are two-fold: transforming
> datasets into analysis-friendly formats, and transforming indices into a
> common format to join datasets together. I have been focused on addressing
> the second challenge, so as to make it easier for my students to perform
> analysis without getting bogged down in data cleaning and manipulation.
>
> This is the motivation for Odessa, a CKAN instance with a corresponding R
> package. In essence, each dataset registered on Odessa is a package
> containing a reference to actual data plus a metadata file that describes
> the indices available in the dataset. I use a combination of regular
> expressions and a graph construction to make automatic inferences about how
> to join datasets together. The idea is that you tell the library which
> datasets to connect, and it figures out how to do it. The secondary idea is
> that only one person needs to create a metadata file for a given dataset and
> then anyone in the community has access to it via the shared platform.
>
> The overall framework is alpha-level maturity, but I thought it would be
> helpful to get some first impressions and feedback on how useful people
> think this idea is and what sorts of features/functionality are of interest.
> The CKAN instance is located at http://odessa.zatonovo.com/ and the R
> package is at https://github.com/zatonovo/odessa. I have plans for adding a
> corresponding Python implementation in addition to adding more inference
> capabilities. I'm actively looking for case studies to work on, so if you
> have any thoughts, please let me know.
>
> Warm Regards,
> Brian Rowe
>
>
> P.S. I hope this isn't too presumptuous, but I will be in London/Cambridge
> Wednesday - Sunday if anybody in that neck of the woods is interested in
> discussing any of this in person.
>
>
>

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