[ckan4rdm] automatic metadata extraction

[Joe Tsoi]

Hi,

I'm one of the CKAN core devs and I've created a ckan extension that
is a bit of a toy example. I hope that it might interest some people
on this list. The ckan extension is for FITS images generally used in
astronomy. When a fits file is uploaded to ckan, it automatically
parses the file and extracts the metadata and saves it against the
ckan resource, it also generates a greyscale jpeg image of the fits
file which serves as the image preview when the resource is previewed
in ckan.

I've setup a demo of it at http://astro-joet.rhcloud.com/dataset and
I've uploaded a couple of sample images taken from the Hubble fits
sample images. The source code for the extension is available at
https://github.com/joetsoi/ckanext-astro . I've actually added a
custom extension point to ckan which this extensions uses that isn't
currently available in vanilla ckan, but I hope to get some form of it
into ckan core. It's just a demo, so I'm pretty sure if you upload a
non fits image it'll break, and it's pretty hacky and is probably
buggy.

Anyway I'd like to hear if this sort of automatic metadata extraction
is of any use to anyone, not just for astronomy, but for any type of
file. I'm not an astronomer or anything,  I just thought it might
serve as a good example.

Regards,
Joe