[okfn-labs] Next generation data catalogues.

Mon Aug 26 16:07:35 UTC 2013

I don't think there's a clear picture yet, or more likely we have three cloudy visions - hopefully 
soon we'll have even more cloudy visions :) Each  of us have things we particularly dislike 
about CKAN, or things we want to implement but which CKAN doesn't do a good job of enabling.  
Perhaps dislike is the wrong word, but you probably know what I mean.

At the moment I think the plan is to aim for something 'lean and mean' that provides most 
of the core functionality of CKAN, that will allow us to build on top of.  Although as Friedrich
pointed out it may be that his 'datasets' repo is a good place to start.

Currently the approach is to be, build a PoC, throw it against a wall and see if it sticks.  For instance,
I think Samuele is trying out building a catalog on top of a CMS - perhaps that's the correct approach, 
until we try it, we won't know.  I personally think an NG Catalog looks a lot like a library that anyone
can add to their own project (be it flask, django, whatever) - perhaps it's even just a collection of services.
Maybe it's a mixture of the two.  I think the key thing is to be able to experiment without being constrained
to how CKAN sees the world. I guess you could call it design by accretion.

Also (at least for me) there's a little bit of second system syndrome, which I'm trying really, really hard to
rein in ;)

Ross.

On 26 Aug 2013, at 16:33, Laura James <laura.james at okfn.org> wrote:

> I think this could totally belong in Labs...  
> 
> I saw a bit of the IRC conversation, but I'd love to understand the specific things which a NG catalog would do/need as well. I'm far from a CKAN expert but having a sense at a tech product manager level of what NG would mean in this space would be super.
> 
> Laura
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 26 August 2013 15:45, Ross Jones <ross at servercode.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There was a bit of discussion on the #ckan channel this morning between some developers
> building data catalogs around what a next-generation data catalog would look like.  It was
> noted that it might _not_ look like CKAN, and so we booted up the catalog-ng organisation
> on github (https://github.com/catalog-ng) as a place to work on some ideas and proof-of-concepts
> around what we think would be included in a new data catalog using the knowledge gained
> working with CKAN.
> 
> There really isn't a plan yet, certainly the intention isn't to damage CKAN in any way, but more
> of a way to experiment with building catalogs without any of the baggage involved with a
> mature product - what would you build today with the new tech available and the experience
> of working with CKAN.  Rather than go through the process of doing this outside, I thought it might
> be useful to do this as part of labs and keep it inside OKF, and possibly keep it on a OKF mailing list.
> 
> Does this belong in OKFN-labs? Does the idea of building something new in that area sound
> vaguely interesting to anyone (other than those of us with work with CKAN day-to-day)?
> 
> 
> Ross.
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> Dr Laura James
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