Introducing Datashades.info, a CKAN Community Service

Major Projects CKAN
#1

Dear all,

In case you use CKAN to power an open data portal, a new guest post by Link Digital on our blog may be interesting for you. They introduce how you can take advantage of their latest open data initiative Datashades.info, a tool designed to deliver insights for researchers, portal managers, and the wider tech community to inform and support open data efforts relating to data hosted on CKAN platforms.
You can read it at https://blog.okfn.org/2019/09/23/introducing-datashades-info-a-ckan-community-service/

Best, Lieke Ploeger.

3 Likes
#2

Congratulations, @Starl3n! Being able to tell the history of metrics in CKAN portals has always been a pain point. The Data Shades initiative by Link Digital addresses just that. The number of datasets, organizations, etc., are far from the best metric you can have for a portal, but having a poor metric is better than having no metric, for sure. Besides, it’s the most readily available one.

Now we’ll be able to easily compare portals around the world. If you care about open data portals, be sure to check this out.

@Fernanda_Campagnucci, shall we translate this post to Portuguese for the OKF BR blog?

#3

Thanks for sharing this here @liekeploeger and thanks too to @herrmann for the mention. I’m a bit embarrassed by how long it’s been since I’ve logged in and contributed within this forum!

I can share now that the sort the things we’d like to do with Datashades.info are:

  1. Build a complimentary CKAN extension which runs as an agent to collect more data which can be fed into the index. For example, by complimenting ckanext-googleanalytics and ckanext-GA-Reports to add request response times, query times, CPU utilization, etc which may be useful for uptime service standards. And, bringing all this data into a central index.
  2. Provide a way for portal ‘owners’ to claim a portal index as theirs and then be accredited as authorized accounts that can add context to the portal index pages.
  3. Provide accredited owners with CKAN core and extension update availability reports and recommendations.
  4. Based on added context from portal owners, group portals by type and then compare portals within their own type subsets (national portals, state , city, NGO, and other ‘like’ data portals.
  5. Map the various branches and forks of extensions on github, along with their activity status, and provide further insight for developers that can support greater collaboration and centralization of effort.

This is a short and indicative list but features such as these would be fun to build and, we think, useful for many.

Let us know what features you might like to see?

2 Likes
#4

Sure, @herrmann, that’s a great idea :slight_smile:

#5

Great ideas, @Starl3n!

How about also leveraging the dataportals.org project, perhaps using its database to jumpstart some URLs to be monitored by Datashades.info, no matter whether or not users have already typed them or not?

The translation of the article is already in your mailbox. :smiley:

#6

Here’s the same blog post in Portuguese:

https://br.okfn.org/2019/10/16/apresentando-datashades-info-um-servico-a-comunidade-ckan/

Thanks, @Fernanda_Campagnucci!

@Starl3n, if you like the idea of using the dataportals.org data to extract newer CKAN instances, you can just use the CSV data that is curated there. Even if the main site is currently not working properly. @todrobbins and I are trying to fix it.

Also, @andreiwid runs a project to use crawlers to locate CKAN instances around the world that might be useful to expand the Data Shades database.

1 Like
#7

Hi everyone. I am new here. Nice to be part of CKAN Community :wink:

#8

@Starl3n, if the may displayed is Open Street Map, why do you need the google scripts? When I use the NoScript browser extension to block those (but to allow Datashades.info own scripts), the site simply does not work.