Ramblings of Daniel Graziotin
I received the honors (and the responsibilities) to kickstart the Italian chapter for the Open Knowledge Foundation Open science working group. I am so happy that I have not been alone since the beginning. Together with two OKF Italia founding members (my old friend Maurizio Napolitano and Francesca de Chiara) and two first open scientist to join (Alessandro Sarretta and Angelo Varlotta), I aim...
A new DataDeck version is out. In DataDeck v0.4.0 I implemented quite all the additions I developed in dpm library. In this release I focused on packages. Because DataDeck searches and downloads packages from The Data Hub, it makes sense to have those packages organized and easily managed. Therefore, DataDeck now has a Package Library (or a local workspace): . The Library provides a unique and...
I could not call it v0.4.0 because I did not really add new functionalities since v0.3.2. But take a look at the GitHub compare of v0.3.2 and v0.3.3. A total of 11 commits, showing 21 changed files with 3,605 additions and 1,740 deletions. Not bad for a one-man, ~1300 LOC sized project (still have to figure it out). So why am I posting about this release? Because I am pretty proud of it. In this...
Finally, I was able to work on DataDeck and release version 0.3.1 to the public. During the last 10 days I favored working on the new dpm library. It is difficult for me to contribute to both the projects because DataDeck is completely dpm dependent. Meanwhile, dpm is facing many internal changes. It is switching from a manager for open knowledge packages to a git-styled manager to...
A heated week for OFKN projects! After I joined [ckan-dev] mailing list to discuss about datapkggui and datapkg, many things happened: Datapkg has been renamed to dpm, and is rapidly evolving under-the-hood My datapkggui project has been renamed to DataDeck, it is moving forward to become a CKAN project and will have its tiny Wiki page at . There are some old information on the page right now, I...
I don’t usually post about bugfixing releases, but this one is very important. It seems that nobody (including me and datapkg developers) noticed that datapkg default configuration currently points to the old CKAN Api url, . While developing datapkggui, I simply changed the configuration line ckan.url = to ckan.url = . New users that directly download datapkg (or datapkggui) will face...
It is a pleasure for me to announce the availability of the first public release of datapkggui. Summarizing again, datapkggui is a graphical frontend for datapkg. It looks like a package manager for a GNU/Linux distribution, and it is used for obtaining open data packages. The name of the project has just been changed from datapkg-gui to datapkggui, because of consistency with Python naming...
Time for a little update. It was quite hard to begin coding because I am not familiar with setuptools nor with wxPython. As promised, I began writing the library wrapper for datapkg (it lives in /datapkggui/lib.py. I’m incrementally developing it, and add new functions as soon as I need them. At the current state, it supports downloading, searching and informing about packages. Of course...
My initial study of datapkg code has just finished. The full report can be obtained here (PDF). It is a document which will incrementally be upgraded at each iteration. Sorry for my bad English, I wrote it during late hours of the day 🙂 Let’s summarize it: from what I learned during this software engineering phase, I confirm my first impression that datapkg has not been written to act as a...
Update 2011-30-09: I did not noticed the wonderful CKAN wiki explaining several aspects I was looking for. As I previously announced, I will write a GUI for the datapkg tool during these 10 weeks of stage at FBK. I am beginning today to study its source code. It is very well written – a couple of hacks here and there, but is highly object-oriented and makes heavy uses of design patterns...
Beginning with the next Monday I will start the most open project I’ve ever done. Yet another FBK collaboration begins for me. Under the supervision of Maurizio Napolitano, OKFN ambassador, datapkggui will be a graphical user interface built around the datapkg tool. With the final aim to becoming OKFN official graphical tool for handling open datasets, datapkggui has two major objectives:...
Ramblings of Daniel Graziotin
Dr. Daniel Graziotin received his PhD in computer science, software engineering at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. His research interests include human aspects in empirical software engineering with psychological measurements, Web engineering, and open science. He researches, publishes, and reviews for venues in software engineering, human-computer interaction, and psychology. Daniel is the founder of the psychoempirical software engineering discipline and guidelines. He is associate editor at the Journal of Open Research Software, academic editor at the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal, and academic editor at the Open Communications in Computer Science journal. He is the local coordinator of the Italian Open science local group for the Open Knowledge Foundation. He is a member of ACM, SIGSOFT, and IEEE.
