Fw: Re: [okfn-discuss] Fw: [Geodata] discoverability and the wiki

[Jo Walsh]

----- Forwarded message from Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> -----

Cc: okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org, asc at spum.org

Jo Walsh wrote:
>dear all,

This is really interesting Jo (and Aaron). At this point I feel honour 
bound to mention CKAN :) given that it was expressly designed for 
holding basic metadata for open knowledge/data projects and packages:

  http://www.ckan.net/

>i enjoyed this walkthrough of making a semi-structured metadata registry
>with semantic mediawiki, this one in the context of a distributed geodata 
>repository. Thanks for writing this, Aaron. I am never sure about the
>amount of cognitive load such a detailed syntax would impose on
>potential contributors. But if one is committed, it is better than

This was precisely one the reasons for going for a more web-app type 
approach on CKAN (that plus the desire to do 'full' versioning of data 
and the fact we got started before things like SMW were available ...).

One of the things we want to do asap with CKAN is add support for 
plugins that will allow people to add extra metadata in specific subject 
areas (of course one could also write a simple extension to allow 
'arbitrary' metadata to be added but often having some constraints are 
useful -- if someone is entering data related to shakespeare they don't 
necessarily want to be asked about long/lat extents).

>just having notes on a wiki. It seems also to be an inverted version
>of the old public domain works wiki, initially generated by a dump
>from a structured source. 

Jo (in particular) I note that you've already got some listing of data 
sources and listings on:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Discovery_Working_Group

specifically at:

<http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Discovery_Working_Group#Existing_.28Meta.29_Search_Projects_and_Related_Efforts>

Would it be possible to add CKAN to the list of data catalogues there? 
In addition I wonder if you could be persuaded :) to add a few of these 
items into CKAN, we already have some geo related material:

http://www.ckan.net/tag/search?search_terms=geo
http://www.ckan.net/tag/read/geodata

but it would be good to get more. More comments on Aaron's excellent 
efforts inlined below.

~rufus

PS: since I'm not on the geo at lists.osgeo.org would you mind forwarding 
it there. I'd be very interested to get further responses in this thread 
 ...

>----- Forwarded message from Aaron Straup Cope <asc at spum.org> -----
>
>Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:29:36 -0700
>From: Aaron Straup Cope <asc at spum.org>
>To: geodata at lists.osgeo.org