Allow listing projects as JSON feed

Open Know-How IOP-OKH Change Proposals
1

Proposal

  • The spec should mention that lists of projects from a particular origin should be listed in a feed file/endpoint called feed-okh.json.
  • This file should follow the JSON Feed 1.1 schema.
  • For fields specified in JSON Feed that are similar to fields we have specified in OKH 1.0 we should adopt JSON Feed naming throughout (e.g. keywords → tags)
  • We should mandate that content_text be used in place of the description field of OKH 1.0 and the content_html and summary are never used.

Motivation

Our main use case for the standard in practice has been for platforms (e.g. Appropedia.org, Kitspace.org) to generate and host manifests for projects. Downstream readers of manifests (e.g. crawlers) have no way of listing projects available from a platform.

We need to specify a way for downstream readers to get a list of OKH manifests from a particular platform.

RSS or Atom are possible options but are XML formats. JSON is a more popular serialisation format these days and if we adopt JSON with the Switch from YAML to JSON proposal then it makes sense to stick to a single data serialisation format. Some notes on evaluation of different feed formats are available here.

2

Here’s an example of what this would look like: https://field-ready-projects.openknowhow.org/feed-okh.json

3

I like this json-feed thing, I hadn’t seen anything like this before. It makes a lot of sense for a clean, open way to allow discoverability. I would love to get a deeper understanding of how it works in practice. Would you be willing to give me a short demo sometime?

1 Like
4

Happy to chat about it at the next OKH working group meeting. I’ve just added an alternative proposal to this one:

5

Sounds good, I think that meeting is tomorrow so I’m looking forward to hearing more about it soon.