[okfn-discuss] urls as contracts in CKAN

Mon Nov 23 20:13:00 UTC 2009

2009/11/20 P Kishor <punkish at eidesis.org>:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>> 2009/11/20 James Casbon <casbon at gmail.com>:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I was chatting to someone in the http://www.intermine.org/ team.
>>>
>>> They generate what are essentially views on their database which are
>>> assigned unique urls (called templates in intermine terminology).
>>> They want to know if another service is using this url, so that it can
>>> become a 'contract' between two services.
>>>
>
>
> Please explain a bit more what you mean by a "contract" between the
> two services? Is this "contract" as in the legal sense of the word (I
> will scratch your back if you scratch my back)?
>
> And, what is the expectation in terms of holding one's end of a such contract?
>

See previous reply to rufus, but essentially a comitment to provide a
given data set at a given URL, presumably with a given schema. Here
are a list of existing templates in flymine if you want to get a real
example:
http://www.flymine.org/release-21.1/templates.do

The quid-pro-quo is to integrate these into analysis services or other
'mines', one such analysis service is galaxy:
http://galaxy.psu.edu/

So ideally the galaxy devs could use ckan to query all urls that offer
results of a certain schema, and the users of galaxy would then be
able to access all these datasets in an analysis that can consume that
schema.

James