Data Freshness Roadmap

Owned by Michael Rans
Last updated: Nov 02, 2018
2 min read

This document outlines the roadmap for the Freshness project.

Q4 2018

1. Dev Team: CKAN API change to allow rapid touching of datasets

Since it was proposed that freshness directly alter the HDX CKAN instance data, it needs a way to touch resources. Currently touching resources using resource_patch is very slow. A new method of fixing of resource_patch is needed.  HDX-5579 - Getting issue details... STATUS

2. CJ, Dev Team: Establish Mixpanel measures for freshness

Create events and funnel created in MixPanel for tracking use of freshness workflow.

3. Design, Dev Team: Expose per-dataset freshness info and tools to users via interface

The design and implementation of an indication of freshness in the HDX interface has been done but further improvements could be made.

  • Freshness in the API
  • Sorting and/or filtering by freshness?
  • Add a "Make Fresh" button for data contributors?  If we do this, we may want to implement as an api call so that contributors could click a link in the overdue email to have the same effect.
  • Related to this is this old Jira about making revision_last_updated visible in the UI   HDX-4894 - Getting issue details... STATUS .

See Data Freshness in the UI

4. Serban/Mike: Implement back up of freshness database

The freshness database needs to be backed up to another server in case of failure.

T1 2019

5. Test and adjust freshness process

See Test and Adjust Freshness Process

6. Expose high level freshness metrics to HDX users

Consider exposing:

  • Overall HDX Freshness.  "HDX is 73% fresh today"
  • Per-org Freshness.  We could show an overall metric for an org to all users or just to org members.

Further ideas

  • As data freshness collects a lot of metadata, it could be used for more general reporting. If needed, the list of metadata collected could be extended. 
  • Even for datasets which have an update frequency of "never", there could be an argument for a very rare mail reminder just to confirm data really is static.
  • For the case where data is unchanged and we have sent an overdue email, we should give the option for contributors to respond directly to the automated mail to say so (perhaps by clicking a button in the message).
  • Another way is to provide guidance to data contributors so that as they consider how to upload resources, we steer them towards a particular technological solution that is helpful to us eg. using a Google spreadsheet with our update trigger added.  We could investigate a fuller integration between HDX and Google spreadsheets so that if a data provider clicks a button in HDX, it will create a resource pointing to a spreadsheet in Google Drive with the trigger set up that opens automatically once they enter their Google credentials. We may need to investigate other platforms for example creating document alerts in OneDrive for Business and/or macros in Excel spreadsheets (although as noted earlier, this might create a support headache).