From CKAN

This is a place to make suggestions for CKAN. A short description is all it needs. Please leave contact info because there will probably be discussions on ckan-discuss / ckan-dev lists before implementation.

Anyone can code these up and ask for it to be merged in to the main code. But the usual way is for the CKAN team and Product Manager to choose items to ticket and implement.

Contents 1 Existing Proposals on Separate Pages 2 Small changes 3 Ideas 3.1 Improved groups 3.2 Apps in CKAN 3.2.1 Terminology 3.2.2 Apps 3.2.3 Implementation 3.3 References/Links in CKAN 3.3.1 Implementation 3.3.2 Wizard

Existing Proposals on Separate Pages

See Category:Proposal

Small changes

• On the search page, you can only see the top 5 items of each facet to search by. Can there also be a "More..." button to reveal all the values for say Resource Format? (Richard Cyganiak) Status: New

Ideas

• Add a 'private'/draft phase for datasets which only certain users can view before publishing. This is to allow journalists and others to work on the data and build up information and resources before making available & publishing. Votes: 1 Status: New

Improved groups

This is now a 'super' ticket. See http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1521

This is a set of proposals to make the groups feature more powerful. As a result, currently separate CKAN instances such as ie.ckan.net could be turned into a simple group on the Data Hub without losing their separate identity.

• Group homepages: Make the group pages more attractive and welcoming as homepages. The main Data Hub homepage does a great job at this now – can the group pages be made more like that? They're quite uninformative and bland right now.
• Subdomains for groups: Enable subdomains such as ie.thedatahub.org as aliases for thedatahub.org/group/ireland
• Search within the group: Have a big search box that searches just within the group on the group page, with a look like on http://thedatahub.org/dataset
• Have an “Add a dataset to this group” link on the group page, perhaps in the sidebar.
• Navigation within the group: Have some more navigation starting points on the group page, e.g., the Tags + Resource Format sidebar from http://thedatahub.org/dataset
• Group documentation: Add the ability to add more “About this group” text, or pages like “FAQ” and “Extra field conventions”.
  • The only place where one can currently put group-specific text is before the dataset list. Putting much text there is bad as it moves the datasets below the fold.
  • Can the top-level sections of a group's description be automatically turned into separate pages that are linked from the sidebar? With headlines About, Frequently Asked Questions and How to get involved, we'd then get three links in the sidebar that point to datahub.org/group/ireland/about, datahub.org/group/ireland/frequently-asked-questions, datahub.org/group/ireland/how-to-get-involved.

Apps in CKAN

Terminology

Different meanings of "Apps":

• "Mini Apps/Views": Apps as in pure html/js views (visualizations/presentations of data) or mini applications running on/in CKAN.
• "Related Stuff": Apps as in an application (website/service/tool) that uses this dataset (as in Apps and Ideas extension)
  • This case seems a general example of wanting to link some external thing to a dataset (e.g. this policy paper refs this dataset, this application uses this dataset, this visualization is built on this dataset cf http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-discuss/2011-August/001607.html)

Going forward propose:

• Refer to the latter as a "reference" (or "link")
  • or dataset "use" (or something better!)
• Reserve the term Apps or "Mini-Apps" for the former (alternative: use Widget?)

Having clarified terminology can now focus on Apps as just defined.

Apps

Think these would be a great feature to have as they would allow people to build on top of the platform and have an easy way to deploy as part of the platform.

Photo notes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/6483791983/

Implementation

Propose url schema as follows:

• /dataset/{dataset-name}/app/{app-id}

References/Links in CKAN

As per above discussion aka remote apps / ideas / ...

Implementation

• /dataset/{dataset-name}/reference|link|use/{reference-item-id}
  • If a reference item could exist in its own right (and perhaps refer to multiple datasets then it should get its own url at e.g. /reference/{id}

Would suggest that the addition of reference be considered orthogonal to datasets (and hence with separate authorization i.e. i can add the info that site X uses dataset Y without needing permission to edit dataset Y).

Wizard

• Design and develop a CKAN Loading Wizard to make loading your own CKAN instance simple for say a society, school, charity or college. This may need to include setting up a virtual box because of possibly of the user not having Linux yet.