Managing a data catalog

Introduction

EntryScape Catalog manages data catalogs and the application has its starting point in the list of catalogs. Inside a data catalog other related entities such as datasets and dataset suggestions, dataservices, publishers, showcases and ideas are managed. When you enter the EntryScape Catalog module, you will see a list of existing catalogs that you have access to.

Creating a catalog

A user may create catalogs and share them with other users. The creator of a catalog also becomes its manager. In the sharing settings (accessible through the catalog menu ) users can be assigned roles.

Many data portals expect exactly one data catalog per organization. This should be taken into consideration before creating multiple data catalogs.

Describing a catalog

EntryScape Catalog has native support for DCAT-AP and organizes the properties into three different levels: mandatory, recommended and optional. Values for mandatory properties must be provided in any case and it is up to the user or the organization to decide whether recommended or optional properties should be provided.

Catalog's configuration mechanism allows for the use of different DCAT-AP profiles such as DCAT-AP.DE or DCAT-AP CH. Currently this has to be configured per instance - please get in touch with the EntryScape support if you have any questions regarding this.

Publishing a catalog

All catalogs are private by default and therefore only explicitly assigned users may access and manage the catalog. If the status is green it means that the catalog's metadata is publicly readable and ready to be harvested by Open Data portals.

The access settings of datasets can be changed separately and the status of the catalog affects the dataset status through inheritance. This means that published (status green) datasets cannot be harvested if the catalog is not published.

Revisions

You can view different revisions of your catalogs by clicking on the options menu.

After clicking on Revisions you can see different revisions of your catalog. Click on the revision you want to expand.

Sharing a catalog

In EntryScape Catalog a user can be either a manager or a member.

Managers have full control over a catalog, e.g. they may change the sharing settings and the publication status.

Members can edit the catalog's metadata and manage (create and provide metadata) other entities such as candidates, datasets, etc.

Managing publishers and contact points

The entity types Publisher and Contact point are managed as separate entity types because they are (re-)used among different contexts in catalogs, datasets and distributions.

Access to catalog

If you do not have access to the catalog you need, request access from the person(s) who has the "Manager" role for the catalog or is an Admin. The person in charge of the group is most likely the head of department or unit responsible for the catalog. You may be a member of one or more catalogs depending on your job role and how the data is organised.

If you are an administrator, you can see other catalogs even if they are not published.

Please note that the steps in this instruction on granting access to a catalog require you to be a Manager in order to be followed and carried out. If you do this as a Member of a catalog, you will not be able to manage anyone other than yourself.

Share a data catalog and add the person responsible

!!! info Please note that you can only do this if you have the Manager role.

Click on the options menu of the catalog where you want to add a user. Then click on Sharing settings.

Then type at least 3 letters from the first name of the user you want to add. Then click on the name.

If the person is to be the Manager (for example, Head of Unit), click on the Person icon and click on Manager.

Finally, click "Done" if necessary.

Registration and login via Single-Sign-On (SSO)

Your organization may have installed and configured SSO login. Access to resources and various permissions are set when they create the account for you or changed afterwards.

Download

You can download your catalog in different formats.

Then select the format and click "Download". Use the URL to enable harvesting to an external data portal. This is useful so that e.g. open data portals can make your open data visible.

Remove a catalog

Please note that the catalog cannot be restored if your organization does not have a fresh backup or updated backups.

If you want to delete the catalog, press the options menu then Remove.

Then click No if you change your mind or Yes if you want to confirm that the catalog should be deleted.

Embedding

Once you have published the dataset, you can embed it on a website, for example a blog post, press release or other website that can benefit from the dataset. Go back to the Catalog view. A list of published datasets can be displayed on external web pages by embedding a JavaScript snippet specific to a data catalog. The code snippet for the automatically generated list can be configured and accessed through the Embed item in the catalog menu bar.

Click on the three-point menu of the catalog you want to embed. Then click on Embed.

The embedded JavaScript code does only provide minimal styling and inherits the styling of the surrounding web page.

Choose icons

You can choose to use open set icons such as Font Awesome or icons from the European Data Portal.

You can force specific languages when embedding your catalog. This is done with a parameter. An example for forcing Swedish is to add data-language-code=sv to your embed code.

Choose opening of links

Then you can choose whether links in datasets should open in a new tab or not.

Preview Embedding

Then you can click Preview to see a preview of what the catalog will look like.

Then click Close in the bottom right corner to close the preview.

Then copy the code in the box that you customized with the above choices and paste it into the editor of your choice for your website.

Similar to how you can embed on an external website, you can also embed a dataset or catalog on the intranet. Follow the instructions above for how to view on a website and embed on your intranet.

There are other uses beyond open data for the public and other organizations. For example, it is appropriate to embed those data sets that should not be published as open data on the intranet - so-called shared data that is shared internally within the organization. This can be conveniently in separate catalogs that are embedded on intranets.

There are more advanced ways of building web pages with data from EntryScape by using EntryScape Blocks. To get to know more please get in touch with the EntryScape Support or read more at entryscape.com.