[open-science] OKF tools: ckan.org, thedatahub.org

Mon Apr 2 22:21:47 UTC 2012

Jessy Kate Schingler Mon, 2 Apr 2012 11:23:52 -0700 (rearranged)
> is there a reason people find ckan/thedatahub insufficient for data
> management needs?

You're presupposing folks even know about these tools. (Never overlook
ignorance as a cause of behavior :-) Before your post I hadn't seen
either. I'm still generally ignorant regarding the OKF--being US-based
probably doesn't help, but mostly I'm head-down in my work, coming up
occasionally to "scratch itches," like, why am I cut'n' pasting so
@#$%^&! much? (A: because I can't send OP links to content on my
current wiki, because its firewall's admins are such a PITA.) What I
know, and hence seems useful to me in this domain, are sites/tools
like github, google, sourceforge (etc) which I've used.

> is it related to technical/features, or to peoples' familiarity and
> confidence around the longevity of the site?

Regarding CKAN, it's probably

http://ckan.org/solutions/pricing/
>> FREE[:] Deploy your own community instance hosted on your servers.

If I had my own servers, my life would be rather different. I might be
more productive, but I don't have time to be an admin (famous last
words). I would also hafta eat pet food to afford

>> CKAN Catalogue[:] from $400 / €300 a month

(which might also degrade my productivity, though maybe not :-)

> i'm starting to learn about [thedatahub.org], it seems rather
> perfect for data set management, and even has a change lists for
> data sets, groups, user pages, etc.

I'm unclear on the relationship between thedatahub.org and CKAN:
instance to framework? If so, what is thedatahub.org's data store, and
how is that priced?

I suspect these tools would be quite attractive to folks with my needs
but more $. Unfortunately, being presently near bottom of both the
academic foodchain and the income distribution drives many decisions.

FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>