Filesystem-like Interface to CKAN

[jqnatividad]

What if a CKAN Catalog can be mounted as a filesystem (NFS, Samba, etc.)? And then you can have pseudo-directories for groups and organizations? Won't it make it easier for data publishers and consumers to use CKAN beyond browsing the catalog? Won't it make it more straightforward to target CKAN for ETL scripts?

[rossjones]

Linux/OSX/BSD only I suspect, but writing a Fuse filesystem that uses the CKAN api seems entirely feasible and not too hard.

This wouldn't require any changes to CKAN itself, you'd just need ckanapi and fusepy

[jqnatividad]

Yes @rossjones, FUSE would be the ideal way to do this. I've used Fuse and its quite powerful. Adding this functionality would increase usability in a number of ways:

• Data Consumers:
  • You can use tools like Excel, Tableau, without having specialized connectors/adaptors, etc.
  • Uses an OS's familiar filesystem UI
• Data Publishers:
  • allow greater flexibility in using ETL tools
  • allow easier integration of CKAN in a toolchain as a target and source of data, consistent with the Unix Toolchain Philosophy
  • encourage continued use of the CKAN API, which can be instrumented to better track customer usage.

[rossjones]

And for people who prefer to dump files first, add metadata later (not me, honest), it could be v. useful :)