Blog

QA extension added to the Data Hub

  • John Glover
  • 09 Jan 2012
The CKAN Quality Assurance extension is now live on the Data Hub. The extension calculates a five star rating for each dataset resource based on Tim Berners-Lee's five stars of openness. It also provides a dashboard that lists broken links and openness scores, which can be viewed now at http://thedatahub.org/qa. Screenshots of two of the dashboard pages are shown below. [caption id="attachment_1080" align="alignnone" width="605"] QA Dashboard[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1080" align="alignnone" width="605"] 5 Star Ratings[/caption] The main change from previous versions of the extension is that we can now calculate the five star ratings for dataset resources as soon as they are added or updated. This is because the QA extension makes use of the the new CKAN 1.5.1 ability to schedule tasks/processes to run in the background, which allows us to update information and perform potentially slow tasks much more frequently in response to user actions. This is hopefully a good first step towards making quick feedback available to users and in turn helping the community to improve the quality of our data. In future we hope to improve the actual work done by the QA system in order to provide a more in depth analysis of CKAN resources, and there are also plans to integrate the QA data with our web user interface. A list of planned improvements can be found on the CKAN Trac, but if you have any other suggestions then please comment here or on the CKAN Discuss mailing list. The CKAN wiki has been updated with information about the QA process and changes to our domain model. If you are interested in adding the qa extension to your own CKAN instance, or in helping with development, you can get it here: http://github.com/okfn/ckanext-qa.