Ckan considerations

Naming of fields

Internally, we propose to stick to the schema used by CKAN. That seems, in case of multiple words, to adhere to the _ convention. As far as showing fields to the user, we stick to a description that conforms to the Oxford dictionary. By the way, because DASISH being a European project, it is not strange to support multiple languages. The ckan catalogue's web pages can be shown in different languages, and ckan can be configured to support multiple language for field names also.

Multiplicity of fields

In Dublin Core all fields are allowed to occur more than once. Assume multiple values or occurrences unless restricted explicitly. There might be a problem here. Multiple values are in a relation. Check if this is supported by ckan.

Currently, while Dublin Core and other metadata standards allow for multiple occurrences of a specific property or fields, in ckan this is subject to discussion. This means that multiple occurring fields need to be presented in the catalogue as multiple values of one field. At the moment this holds for the

• Creator
• Contributor
• Language
• CreationDate
• Subject
• Format
• notes

fields.

Since for example 'Notes' is too vague to be considered a property, it might be a good idea to discriminate metadata from other data like URL, MetadataSource and fulltext. On the one hand you would have real metadata properties, while on the other there are properties that ckan requires.

References

CKAN userguide