Establishing the metadata fields

[SC Hoffman]

I am very new to CKAN and have been tasked by my professor to explore and suggest a possible open-source tool. I am not very technical (I cannot set up an implementation myself), so I would like to ask anyone who has implemented CKAN about the metadata. Is it a standard, generic list that you can expand to collect additional metadata? I have been reading the documentation but have not found any information on it yet. Is it best to keep it more generic as the datasets are from different disciplines? Any lessons learned or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Susan

[Brian Bonnlander]

Hi Susan,

Adding extra metadata is a common use case with CKAN.   There is an example in the documentation, but it requires programming background to fully understand.   The programming is mostly there to provide a way for users to enter the metadata and have the values checked for user entry errors:

   

https://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/extensions/adding-custom-fields.html#customizing-dataset-and-resource-metadata-fields-using-idatasetform

If, however, you are translating metadata from another source or format, and you're not worried about providing an interface for entering values or checking those values, you barely need any programming knowledge.   Each dataset metadata datastructure, often referred to in CKAN as a 'package_dict', has an extensible collection of values called "extras".   If you know how to access the metadata, aka package_dict for a dataset in CKAN, you can simply assign new values to "extras" like this:

        package_dict['extras'].append({'key': 'inceptionDate', 'value': '2025-03-21'})

Hope this helps,