[okfn-discuss] CKAN data usage stories

Thu Feb 21 14:59:23 UTC 2008

Dear all,

Still not sure of the best way of putting this, but I wanted to ask and 
write about the "working activity" (stories) which might involve 
"clipping together" open data sets registered at CKAN.

I suppose this is essentially the mash-up thing, but I wondered whether 
we could articulate it in terms of an "event driven business story".

Questions:

Which productive activities involve pulling data from CKAN?
What are the events to which these activities respond?
What are the goals which these activities seek to achieve?

The most basic level would be:

Event: Time to get open data.
Goal: To have and use open data.
Story: Get data from CKAN.

The next level up may be semantic web ideas....

Above and beyond this, we might have something like:

Event: Time to study Shakespeare.
Goal: Greater appreciation of Shakespeare's work.
Story: Get texts data. Get performances data. Get map data.

Could we investigate what's going to happen here? What would be going on 
in the user's mind? How do they discover individual data sets, how do 
they discover productive combinations of data set "atoms"? Isn't it 
going to be hard to combine data at first? Does this suggest a need to 
record which data sets have so far been put together productively? Would 
these combinations usefully be recorded as new ("molecular") data sets?

Also, end-users will interact with "clipped together" data with some 
kind of system that is presenting this data. The lowest level is "raw". 
Then raw but "semantically" driven interfaces. But usability will only 
come from presenting an interface to a particular combination of data 
always. And that may involve building one or many particular interfaces 
for that particular combination, to support the work that involves 
making use of the open data.

So does an open knowledge consumer need to see where they can go to 
interact with the registered data sets? Downstream connections?

Then, when a user sees the data combination they need hasn't been done 
before, they begin to create the dataset combination. What would this 
involve? Or if a combination has been made, but there are no interfaces, 
they can [1] begin requirements analysis work. But what would this 
involve for CKAN?

Very interested to hear what people think using open data might look 
like in the future!

Basically, I'm trying to broaden the analysis out from [2], "create, 
read, update, or delete records of open knowledge projects or packages."

Best wishes,

John.

[1] http://desire.appropriatesoftware.net/events/70/
[2] http://desire.appropriatesoftware.net/products/30/

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