[okfn-help] International development data on CKAN

Wed Dec 2 21:11:31 GMT 2009

Hi all,

Rufus, David: Meet Ben Harden (environmental physicist at UEA). Ben is
working on a series of profiles for international development data
(including fields that closely resemble or equal some of those on
CKAN). Currently this is on Google Docs - but eventually we will need
to publish on a website.

It would be great if this could be done either via CKAN (and then
published on an external website with basic querying functionality),
or at least published in a form that meant copies of the profiles
could go onto CKAN.

Hence here are some questions:

  * Currently we have several fields that it would be good to import
into CKAN preserving some structure (rather than just adding to free
text field). I understand CKAN can now support arbitrary metadata. Is
this the same as the key/value pairs? If so can we have more than the
three that come up on web interface? It would be great to use this
functionality for our data profiles. For example, we have fields with
dates and associated country names - which are probably fairly generic
fields. Some have many country names associated with them. Perhaps we
could use appropriate ISO values? I've often thought this kind of
information might be useful, another example might be language of
resource - where there are also ISO codes we could use.
  * In some areas changes to our model would be quite simple. E.g. we
currently have a 'contact information' field. We could create a
separate email address field which could correspond to the 'owner
email ' field or 'maintainer email' field in CKAN. What is distinction
between owner/maintainer here?
  * Regarding license field, we currently have 'OKD compliant' as
Yes/No field. Would probably better to use something to correspond
with drop down menu in CKAN menu. Would a number be best here? If so,
is there a list that we can use to link numbers to items in the menus?
  * Generally, I wonder whether it would be worth looking to existing
standards and guidance for this. Especially where fields may be
generic. It would be great to ensure the fields in our profiles comply
with standards, where standards exist. I wonder whether this has been
thought about in relation to government data? Should we be looking to
Dublin Core? Are there other metadata standards we should examine?

Ben: in terms of taking this forward, I wonder whether it would be
worth putting a copy of our latest data model (if we can call it that)
on the OKF wiki somewhere, e.g. at:

  http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/development/dataprofiles

-- 
Jonathan Gray

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