announcing dataverse-sample-data for demos, testing, etc.

[Philip Durbin]

Hello Dataverse enthusiasts,

I'd like to tell you about a new repo at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-sample-data

Here are the problems we are trying to solve:

- When you install Dataverse, it's empty, a ghost town. This is perfect when you are ready to go into production but not so great if you want to do a demo of what Dataverse can do.

- When testing Dataverse, sometimes it's nice to have known datasets with known files rather than creating ad hoc datasets that might be a bit different than the last time you tested.

Enter dataverse-sample-data.

The idea is that we have curated a few datasets and files for demo purposes and put them in that git repo.

We have also written some code using Python and pyDataverse[1] to create and publish dataverses, datasets, and files based on what is placed in the "data" folder in that git repo.

If you want to try it out, please see the README. I wrote about how to populate an existing demo Dataverse installation as well as automating the entire process of installing Dataverse and then uploading sample data on Amazon 's cloud (AWS EC2) using dataverse-ansible[2].

If you are interested in contributing sample data, please see the CONTRIBUTING file.

If you have any questions, please just ask! And you are welcome to open issues as well, of course.

I'll attach a screenshot of what the sample data looks like from a recent run.

Thanks,

Phil

1. Many thanks to Stefan Kasberger for pyDataverse! https://github.com/AUSSDA/pyDataverse

2. Many thanks to Don Sizemore for dataverse-ansible! https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-ansible

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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin