Alan, Jonathan, To follow up from a few weeks ago ...
2009/6/23 Jonathan Gray <[email protected]>: > On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Alan > Jenkins<[email protected]> wrote: >> I think most sites have multiple download files. Yes, that's my impression to. As yet most data download doesn't have the all-in-one for download form that software has where usually there is a single tar.gz/zip/exe (or at least one per platform). >> My impression is that the links on CKAN are for human consumption. >> Usually when visiting the main URL for a site, it's not immediately >> obvious where to find the page with download information. >> >> If I wanted to download a large dataset, I would want to visit the >> download page on the appropriate site first. It would be a nice way to >> check that the CKAN info (e.g. license) was sane and up-to-date, that >> the site was still live, what size file it was, etc. I think there is some ambiguity there at the moment as to whether the download link should be a specific file or a page with download info. I think you are probably right that where there is no single canonical download file/link we should have a link to the page. I note that even with software there is quite a lot of support now for automagically extracting download links from a page and using those to get the data onto your machine automatically. >> My opinion is that direct download URLs are only appropriate in a few >> limited settings, e.g. in a "pull request" email for a GIT repository, >> or in a how-to document. I don't think CKAN is one of these case, but >> of course you are free to decide otherwise :-). Right. I guess I'm wondering whether "data/content" will go the way of software (multiple files in source but a single bundle to download) or whether it will remain multi-file. At least for the present we've clearly got to support the multi-file option ... > This is true. One of our long term goals with CKAN is to develop > something like an 'apt-get' for open knowledge - in which case the > direct download links would be useful. We're also hoping that where > there are multiple links, we can introduce support for multiple > download URLs, or scripts to grab or scrape the relevant files. I > think we'd also like to mirror versions of open datasets and to > encourage people to link to 'cleaned up', linked or other versions of > the data... Yes, we have a "work-in-progress" in the form of our data package script: http://www.okfn.org/datapkg [...] Rufus _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
