Current Situation

A resource belongs to a single package. A resource can only hold very limited pieces of information i.e a url, hash, a description and its format/type. It also has state i.e whether it is active and not active. They are versioned but not dated.

The user is given an option to reorder the resources against a package, this order has no relevance apart from how the information is displayed.

Use Cases

• Data should be able to be grouped for the same information in different formats, so you do not get duplicated data.

• There needs to be a mechanism to timeseries data, so that search results only display the latest package. This needs to be done in a way that the older data is still easily accessible. This should be done with the minimum of user effort.

• The ordering of the data should be presented without the need for user input.

• There needs to more information stored against the data, beyond just its format and a description.

• Users should be able to refashion the data and post a whole new set of this derived data.

• Groups of data should be able to be synced across packages/instances. In order for derived data set to be associated with existing packages.

• When new versions of the data arrive it should be easy to copy an old one and change versions/dates as required.

• A user may want to upload a resource separately from the package and decide later on where the best place for it is.

• A place to put a time-to-release date against a piece of potential data.

• We need a marker to show that the certain data sets are missing.

• Dashboard of what data has been released, when is going to be released.

Possible solutions

1. Make the data model for resources richer. The suggested model would be

Package  <m2m>  data_group <o2m> data <o2m>  resource

data_group now becomes a first class entity.

The data group would be a holder for a timeseries of "data"

Each bit of data can have multiple resources of different data_types.

2. Improve package relationships. This will involve giving package relationships more informations such as the date of the relationship in order to make a time series. (this date information could also be against the package)

3. Add a package group table. All current packages get a package_group and then we will have a way to add packages in a time-line. Packages will have time series data information.