[CKAN-support] info on spatial extension

Fri Feb 7 12:39:16 UTC 2014

Hi George,

My name is Adrià Mercader and I'm one of the CKAN developers
responsible for the spatial extension.

See comments below, I also included answers to a previous email with
subject "AURIN"

> I'm trying to get hold of some information about the ckanext-spatial
> extension. We have a potential customer at the University of Melbourne
> involved with spatial sciences. If we can score this, it'll be our first
> non-government customer and our first foray into the science/research
> industry.
That sounds great!

> The info I'm looking for around ckanext-spatial is more broad than
> technical... What's the general future for this extension? I saw in the docs
> somewhere that some plugins in the spatial extension are aimed at being more
> of an example. Does this mean that new GIS-related standards may or may not
> be supported?
The spatial extension is very much alive and we plan to support and
extend it in the near future.
Most of what the extension does is internal and not immediately
apparent on the frontend, stuff like spatial searches or harvesting
metadata from spatial servers.
I guess that the example plugins that you mention are the WMS preview
[1], which is indeed an example plugin aimed at other developers to
extend. The reason we don't support this one like we do eg with the
GeoJSON one is that is quite complex to maintain a generic viewer of
this kind. Having said that many others have implemented previews for
WMS and other spatial formats, like data.gov, data.gov.uk, or the
Belgium portal have integrated more powerful viewers, including
support for other formats like WFS. See eg

http://portal.openbelgium.be/dataset/geospatial-test

It is definitely possible then to integrate a more advanced viewer if
that is a requirement.
We will probably move the previews to a separate extension at some
point to make them easier to maintain, but that should not affect any
potential use.

[1] http://docs.ckan.org/projects/ckanext-spatial/en/latest/previews.html#wms-preview
[2] http://docs.ckan.org/projects/ckanext-spatial/en/latest/harvesters.html

>> Requirement:
>> Metadata harvesting (incl ISO19139) needs to be configured and enabled,
>> primarily for WFS 1.1 but later for WFS 2.0 and SDMX.
This is done via the spatial harvesters, eg CSW [2] which import
ISO19193 documents into CKAN objects. The harvesters per se are
agnostic in terms of what services or data are described on the
metadata, but I guess that when they talk about support for WFS they
mean previewing it. In this case see my previous comment. I'm not
familiar with SDMX and I don't think we can import/preview/... it

>> Also, I understand that there are features in development that are intended
>> for research organisations. Are these features for the release of 2.2 or is
>> this a 3.0 thing?
I'm not sure what specific features you are referring about. I guess
some of the new features in 2.2 (new filestore, datapusher, etc) could
fall into this category, but afaik we don't have a specific set of
features yet for research organizations.

>> Sorry, one more thing... there's a requirement on supported file types. I
>> haven't heard back on weather this is referring to the ability for
>> visualisation or just weather files of this type can be uploaded.
As Mark mentioned in the previous emai any kind of file can be
uploaded. In terms of previewing, we support this ones:

>> o       Xls/xlsx
>> o       Csv
>> o       Json/geojson
>> o       Pdf
>> HTML? (linking to other resources like Urban Observatory)

These spatial ones could potentially be previewed integrating the
adavanced viewers I mentioned before:
>> o       Wfs
>> o       Wms
>> o       Kml

These can not be currently previewed
>> o       Shp
>> o       Doc/docx
>> o       Zip

Hope this helps,

Adrià