The basic purpose of this extension is provide a way to record 'apps' (applications) that relate to datasets in CKAN. Both existing apps and ideas for apps should be permitted.

DSPL, the Dataset Publishing Language, is being promoted by Google for its "Google Public Data Explorer" system. It is an XML format with metadata.

The format is described on the ​developer docs ofthe Google Code site.

Google provides a ​Python script which reads CSV data and generates DSPL

Sample from ​http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/docs/dspl_sample.html:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<dspl xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/dspl/2010"
    xmlns:geo="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/geo"
    xmlns:geo_usa="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/geo/us"
    xmlns:time="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/time"
    xmlns:quantity="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/quantity"
    xmlns:entity="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/entity">

  <import namespace="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/time"/>
  <import namespace="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/quantity"/>
  <import namespace="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/entity"/>
  <import namespace="http://www.google.com/publicdata/dataset/google/geo"/>
  
  <info>
    <name>
      <value>My statistics</value>
    </name>
    <description>
      <value>Some very interesting statistics about countries</value>
    </description>
    <url>
      <value>http://www.stats-bureau.com/mystats/info.html</value>
    </url>
  </info>

  <provider>
    <name>
      <value>Bureau of Statistics</value>
    </name>
    <url>
      <value>http://www.stats-bureau.com</value>
    </url>
  </provider>

  <topics>
    <topic id="geography">
      <info>
        <name><value>Geography</value></name>
      </info>
    </topic>
    <topic id="social_indicators">
      <info>
        <name><value>Social indicators</value></name>
      </info>
      <topic id="population_indicators">
        <info>
          <name><value>Population indicators</value></name>
        </info>
      </topic>
      <topic id="poverty_and_income">
        <info>
          <name><value>Poverty & income</value></name>
        </info>
      </topic>
      <topic id="health">
        <info>
          <name><value>Health</value></name>
        </info>
      </topic>
    </topic>
  </topics>

  <concepts>
    <!-- As noted in the tutorial, this concept should extend quantity:amount.-->
    <concept id="population">
      <info>
        <name>
          <value>Population</value>
        </name>
        <description>
          <value>Size of the resident population.</value>
        </description>
      </info>
      <topic ref="population_indicators"/>
      <type ref="integer"/>
    </concept>

    <!-- This country concept is defined for educational purposes only. A country
    concept exists in the Google geo dataset. See:

    http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/docs/canonical/geo.html --> 
    <concept id="country" extends="geo:location">
      <info>
        <name>
          <value>Country</value>
        </name>
        <description>
          <value>My list of countries</value>
        </description>
      </info>
      <type ref="string"/>
      <property id="name">
        <info>
          <name><value xml:lang="en">Country name</value></name>
          <description>
            <value xml:lang="en">The official name of the country</value>
          </description>
        </info>
        <type ref="string"/>
      </property>
      <table ref="countries_table"/>
    </concept>

    <!-- This US state concept is defined for educational purposes only. A US state
      concept exists in the Google geo US dataset. See:

      http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/docs/canonical/geo.us.html --> 
    <concept id="state" extends="geo:location">
      <info>
        <name>
          <value>State</value>
        </name>
        <description>
          <value>US states</value>
        </description>
      </info>
      <type ref="string"/>
      <property concept="country" isParent="true"/>
      <table ref="states_table"/>
    </concept>

    <concept id="gender" extends="entity:entity">
      <info>
          <name>
          <value>Gender</value>
        </name>
        <description>
          <value>Gender, Male or Female</value>
        </description>
        <pluralName><value>Genders</value></pluralName>
        <totalName><value>Both genders</value></totalName>
      </info>
      <type ref="string"/>
      <table ref="genders_table"/>
    </concept>

    <concept id="unemployment_rate" extends="quantity:rate">
      <info>
        <name>
          <value>unemployment rate</value>
        </name>
        <description>
          <value>The percent of the labor force that is unemployed, not seasonally
            adjusted.</value>
        </description>
        <url><value>http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm</value></url>
      </info>
      <topic ref="social_indicators"/>
      <type ref="float"/>
      <attribute id="is_percentage">
        <type ref="boolean"/>
        <value>true</value>
      </attribute>
    </concept>

  </concepts>

  <slices>
    <slice id="countries_slice">
      <dimension concept="country"/>
      <dimension concept="time:year"/>
      <metric concept="population"/>
      <table ref="countries_slice_table"/>
    </slice>

    <slice id="states_slice">
      <dimension concept="state"/>
      <dimension concept="time:year"/>
      <metric concept="population"/>
      <metric concept="unemployment_rate"/>
      <table ref="states_slice_table"/>
    </slice>

    <slice id="countries_gender_slice">
      <dimension concept="country"/>
      <dimension concept="gender"/>
      <dimension concept="time:year"/>
      <metric concept="population"/>
      <table ref="countries_gender_slice_table"/>
    </slice>

  </slices>

  <tables>
    <table id="countries_table">
      <column id="country" type="string"/>
      <column id="name" type="string"/>
      <column id="latitude" type="float"/>
      <column id="longitude" type="float"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">countries.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>

    <table id="countries_slice_table">
      <column id="country" type="string"/>
      <column id="year" type="date" format="yyyy"/>
      <column id="population" type="integer"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">country_slice.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>

    <table id="states_table">
      <column id="state" type="string"/>
      <column id="name" type="string"/>
      <column id="country" type="string">
        <value>US</value>
      </column>
      <column id="latitude" type="float"/>
      <column id="longitude" type="float"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">states.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>

    <table id="states_slice_table">
      <column id="state" type="string"/>
      <column id="year" type="date" format="yyyy"/>
      <column id="population" type="integer"/>
      <column id="unemployment_rate" type="float"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">state_slice.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>

    <table id="genders_table">
      <column id="gender" type="string"/>
      <column id="name" type="string"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">genders.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>

    <table id="countries_gender_slice_table">
      <column id="country" type="string"/>
      <column id="gender" type="string"/>
      <column id="year" type="date" format="yyyy"/>
      <column id="population" type="integer"/>
      <data>
        <file format="csv" encoding="utf-8">gender_country_slice.csv</file>
      </data>
    </table>
  </tables>

</dspl>

For example, edit the warandpeace dataset and add an extra with key "comments" and value "[{u'date': u'Tue Aug 21 13:01:48 GMT 2012', u'comment': u'testing ckan', u'userId': u'11702'}, {u'date': u'Wed Aug 22 13:01:48 GMT 2012', u'comment': u'testing ckan again', u'userId': u'11702'}]", now visit API URLs such as:

/api/search/dataset?sort=metadata_modified+desc&all_fields=1&limit=10

/api/rest/dataset/warandpeace

/api/action/package_show?id=warandpeace

The value of the extra comes out as a string in the dataset JSON, rather than having its contents unpacked into a list of JSON objects.

Most of CKANs storage options are tied to the USA. This brings concerns of data security for some organisations who may wish to adopt the system. ​Wuala is a distributed file system that stores data in a peer-to-peer manner. The company behind it, LaCie? sells storage for a fee. However, they also enable clients to have 'free' storage space when machines act as a storage node.

In order to be a storage node, a machine needs to be online for more than 14% of the time - roughly 4h per day. Most CKAN servers are likely to have a far greater uptime than this.

Supporting Wuala would go some way to enabling CKAN to be used in a secure manner. That is, CKAN could be promoted for organisational use where there is lots of data to be stored and large geographic distances to be managed. There is a ​Python client available and a fairly ​long Google Tech Talk that overviews the system.

Should have function/facility to get a diff of a version object between 2 revisions. Function should return a dictionary of fields with diffs.

Details:

• Do we deal with m2m relationships (and m2one on the many side)?
• What is diff?
  • For text fields output of python diff command
  • For non-text field guess just simple +/- for what was there before and now

Cost: 4h (don't think this is a huge request)

• Provide and include a "language.js" file.

Problem here is that foreign key then becomes "complicated" (composite).

• Could also deprecate continuity_id field in favour of the basic foreign key on ie

nav_named_link won't include the nice icon even when passing the icon keyword param.

At some point the SOLR schema used by CKAN will need to be changed and the changes won't be always backward compatible, so we need a mechanism to support instances that use older versions of the schema. This process will involve:

• Better documentation on how to deploy SOLR, as single instance or multicore
• A convention on how to tag schema versions and SOLR endpoints to ensure that CKAN instances point to the correct SOLR URL.
• (If possible) Checks in CKAN core that deal with different schema versions.

Lots of things rely on the old (i.e. pre-SOLR) search param formats, including ckanclient / DGU. Need a translation layer to convert these params (in api v1&2) to SOLR syntax.

This functionality was broken by the changes in #1277 which went into 1.5a

Among other things this will allow the tests to run much quicker.

The Handle System is an initiative to provide persistent references for resources. That is, it's basically a proxy system for preventing link rot.

Its documentation is here: ​http://www.handle.net/. Servers running CKAN could host a "Local Handle Service", which redirects a hash of a resource to an actual URL.

Some suggested use cases:

• Researcher would like to cite where data came from
• Agencies would like to have a way to prevent vendor lock-in from CKAN if they decide to move to another platform

Why?

• We already use quite a bit of boostrap
• We already plan to use bootstrap JS
• Bootstrap is excellent and pretty light

Switch to repoze.who + openid plugin for authentication from authkit.

Already did this in microfacts so should be fairly easy.

We are already using standard kforge css though copied locally and with a few modifications.

We should switch to using common copy on m.okfn.org. Some work will be required to factor out any changes we have made.

Cost: 2h

404 Not Found The resource could not be found.

The widget for tag autocompletion is broken in various ways.

For example, if I edit a package that is tagged "music", and just tab through the form fields to get to the Author field, then the widget changes to "industrial-music" as I tab through it.

Or if the tag is "foo bar" and I hit alt-right to jump to the end of the text field (with the intent of adding a third tag), then the contents change to "foo barbecue".

Should not be hard to do (lots of existing libraries) but not sure that this is very important.

E.g. ​http://ckan.net/tag/read/postcodes this has no-postcode listed but when you look at that package 'postcodes' isn't a tag ...

I suspect this may be to do with search using deleted tags as I think no-postcode had postcodes as a tag at some point earlier ...

Similar to ticket:108 but for tags:

/api/search/tag?q

For tags search is extremely simple since you can only search by name.

Possible Extras

• Allow "exotic" ordering of results e.g. ordering by number of packages with that tag.
• Return this number with tag list.

With an IDatasetForm plugin active with a form_to_db_package_schema() method that returns a schema based on ckan/logic/schema.py:form_to_db_package_schema() I'm getting validation errors like this:

[ckan.controllers.api] Validation error: "{'type': 'Validation Error', 'junk': [u'The input field junk was not expected.']}"

They seem to be caused when a data dict with key 'tags' is passed to e.g. the package_update API, for example in ckan/tests/functional/api/model/test_vocabulary.py there are various tests that get this error when they call package_update (if you run the tests with a suitable IDatasetForm plugin active).

In ckan/logic/schema.py:form_to_db_package_schema() 'tags' is for some reason deliberately removed from the schema.

The tag name is limited in length in the db table to 100 characters. If you try and create a longer one you get an exception. This should cause a ValidationError? and tell the user this sensibly.

Test DbIndex? with sqla 0.5 (and get it working if it does not work).

Cost: ??

Priority: low because DbIndex? is not currently that important to us (also wonder whether we should try using CKAN code here to stop us reinventing the wheel).

Super #1669

Test all of the new auth logic hooks for publisher profile to make sure they work as expected. Also make sure that we have a test to compare the naming of the core auth funcs with the profile hooks (so we can see what may have changed in one but not the other).

please ignore

The tests currently take 41 mins to run on most laptops. This slows down development and discourages a test-driven approach.

We'd like to see the tests pass in 5 mins or less (but anything would be an improvement!)

Some suggestions for achieving this include:

• Upgrading the entire codebase to SQLAlchemy 0.6 so that tests could run against an in-memory SQLite database
• Not setting up and tearing down the database so frequently.

• created repo for final list of instructions: ​http://github.com/okfn/ecportal-server-setup

IPackageForm, IGroupForm and IOrganizationForm allow you to define e.g. new package types with new top-level URLs, but the example extensions don't have tests for this yet.

Copy ckan core postgres package search tests to the ckanext-solr extension and update them so that they use the solr search backend.

Since my last pull I'm getting a strange new error which is presumably to do with my local config or assumptions about the storage extension.

Test output here: ​https://gist.github.com/2007985

Test coverage for ckan.lib.cli is 34%. Need to improve that.

From Toby: tests around the auth functions and new actions - probably needs an improved testing mechanism and things like test data creation on via actions

Test coverage for ckan.lib.cache is only 40%. Can that be usefully improved?

AFAICT there are no tests for the logic layer at the moment. I imagine this is an issue (if it is not please explain and close as wontfix).

In the footer: Change 'Powered by CityData?' to Powered by DataSuite? (with link to ckan.org/datasuite)

Links in left hand side of footer should change to a link to ckan.org, link to OKFN, link to ckan.org/datasuite/about and link to Pricing Page (on ckan.org .. will be /datasuite/solutions)

In create dataset form, prefilled tag examples should include one example with a space, e.g. "mental health"

Change 'Groups' to 'Publishers' everywhere

Homepage copy/images (Ira to supply?)

Symptom #1: Groups without titles don't get a clickable link, because there is no text. Defaulting to the group name would solve this trouble. Symptom #2: Package groups drop-down list show's 'None' when a group doesn't have a title.

Therefore, we need to centralize presentation of group title, so it defers to group name. And we need tests.

Also please sort groups by title on group list page.

CKAN uses a database. We can put the database on another machine and then clone the CKAN machine. Then there are two machines calling the database and converting SQL results into HTTP responses.

How many machines can you have before the database becomes the bottleneck? At that point, what QoS can be obtained with normal hardware?

Afterwards, can CKAN be made to scale further than this with a little development? Can its Postgres database be mirrored in realtime? Or can we change SQL writes (create/updates) to write to many databases?

Are there any other options for scaling the persistence mechanism?

Requested by DGU.