Frictionless Data Community Call September 2024
On our last community call on September 26th we discussed with the community the Frictionless project and changes in the governance of the Python Framework.
The roadmap and maintenance of the Python Framework has been led until now by Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), with precious contributions from the community. We would like now to expand the governance framework to include new maintainers outside of OKFN. Since the end of August we have been extremely happy to welcome Pierre Camilleri from Multi.coop (opens new window), which builds FLOSS for public administrations, as new official maintainer of the Python Framework. Pierre also maintains Validata (opens new window), a wrapper of Frictionless offering custom checks for the French administration.
If you or anyone you know is interested in maintaining the Frictionless Framework, please get in touch. We don’t want to brag, but we are getting close to 1,000 stars on GitHub, if this can help motivate people!
As suggested by Peter Desmet, we will also prepare the codebase for peer review from the PyOpenSci community, which may also be able to support the maintenance.
All of those changes will be reflected on the website, on the People page (opens new window), among others. While we are at it, we will also make the Frictionless Universe page (opens new window) more informative, by including for each library information about who the main authors and maintainers, the status (including GitHub stars), the features supported, downloads, and maybe adding a common API. Probably most of that information can be pulled from GitHub, in the same way INBO (opens new window) does.
# Community discussion on the Data Package update:
Part of the Data Package (opens new window) update under the NLnet grant was to propose a Data Package integration to use as a data API for data repositories like Zenodo and CKAN. The proposals are in discussions with the relevant teams.
We all agreed we need to build more links between Data Package and the FAIR principles. Steve Diggs and Phil Schumm proposed to build a working group around Data Package adoption, to spark the discussion around Data Package, not only with the people involved in data sharing, but also end-users and researchers to demonstrate how valuable Data Package can be for their own work, and how much efficiency it can bring even if one is just interested in doing secondary data analysis. As Peter Desmet rightly pointed out, while there are alternatives out there of other specs you could use instead of Data Package, their scope of use is often limited and they do not have software implementations. What makes Frictionless attractive is that it has been around for more than a decade and it has been used in many different areas, so it is general enough to suit everyone’s needs. We therefore started a new channel on Slack (opens new window) to discuss Data Package adoption, please join the discussion.
We also got an update from the categorical data working group (Kyle Husmann, Phil Schumm, Albert-Jan Roskam, and Jan van der Laan), who are building a new approach in the form of a recipe to allow to define data resources that are explicit categorical tables, with categorical codes and tables, and hierarchical information about the categories and rich metadata about the levels. If you are interested in being part of this discussion, please reach out to Kyle Husmann on Slack. They will present their work at the November community call.
# Join us in October!
Next community call is on October 31st (oh so spooky!). Keith Hughitt will be presenting.
Do you have something you would like to present to the community at one of the upcoming calls? Let us know via this form (opens new window), or come and tell us on our community chat on Slack (opens new window)(also accessible via a Matrix bridge (opens new window) if you prefer to use an open protocol).
You can sign up for the call already here (opens new window). Do you want to share something with the community? Let us know when you sign up.
# Call Recording
Here is the recording of the full call: