Metadata overview
Metadata is a structured framework for documenting data. Some people like to say it's data about data. It's essential if anyone hopes to find and use your data.
The metadata standard we're using is adapted from those used by the City of San Francisco and data.gov (the U.S. Federal government's open data repository).
Each CKAN dataset has default metadata fields. Some of these are filled in automatically by CKAN when a dataset is created or updated, while others are set by the publisher when the dataset is created and can be updated by the publisher or WPRDC staff (or in some cases, programmatically, such as the updating of the Temporal Coverage metadata field by our watchdog utility.
WPRDC custom metadata
After upgrading our data portal to CKAN 2.7, it became possible to easily create new metadata subfields within the 'extras' metadata field for any dataset. This can be done through API calls or through the CKAN web interface (by editing the dataset package).
Below are partial lists of 'extras' metadata fields in use on https://data.wprdc.org:
| field name | Use | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| last_etl_update | Indicates when the ETL job last finished. | rocket-etl |
| time_field | Dict specifying the field name in a table that stores each record's timestamp (used for determining dataset freshness). | pocket-watch |
| no_updates_on | List of days (e.g., "weekends") coding for when a table is not expected to update. | pocket-watch |