[okfn-discuss] CKAN spam

[Jonathan Gray]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Alan
Jenkins<alan-jenkins at tuffmail.co.uk> wrote:
> I think most sites have multiple download files.
>
> My impression is that the links on CKAN are for human consumption.
> Usually when visiting the main URL for a site, it's not immediately
> obvious where to find the page with download information.
>
> If I wanted to download a large dataset, I would want to visit the
> download page on the appropriate site first.  It would be a nice way to
> check that the CKAN info (e.g. license) was sane and up-to-date, that
> the site was still live, what size file it was, etc.
>
> My opinion is that direct download URLs are only appropriate in a few
> limited settings, e.g. in a "pull request" email for a GIT repository,
> or in a how-to document.  I don't think CKAN is one of these case, but
> of course you are free to decide otherwise :-).

This is true. One of our long term goals with CKAN is to develop
something like an 'apt-get' for open knowledge - in which case the
direct download links would be useful. We're also hoping that where
there are multiple links, we can introduce support for multiple
download URLs, or scripts to grab or scrape the relevant files. I
think we'd also like to mirror versions of open datasets and to
encourage people to link to 'cleaned up', linked or other versions of
the data...

[snip]

> The tags bother me a little bit.  It can be difficult to discover the
> "right" one - currently there are more tags than packages!  Some of them
> are non-obvious, e.g. the specific meaning of "open-access".  Some of
> them I have no idea, e.g. what "bri" means :-).

Yes - I've been wondering whether it might be good to have more of the
sense of the tags being 'curated'. (As well as the collections of
packages associated with them..) In any case perhaps we should look
into how we can make the tags more documented/visible on the site.

> An improvement might be to make tag creation slightly more heavy-weight,
> and encourage you to enter a short description.  That would also make it
> easier for e.g. an admin to decide when different tags have been created
> for the same concept, and that they should be merged.

Thats a nice idea!

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org