CanWIN's CKAN platform is composed of three components used to store the data. The Filestore, Datastore and Datapusher.
The FileStore allows users to upload data files to CKAN resources, and to upload logo images for themes (groups), and facilities (organizations). The FileStore provides 'blob' storage of whole files with no way to access or query parts of that file. This means data stored in the FileStore can only be downloaded as a whole.Users will see an upload button when creating or updating a resource, theme or facility.
The DataStore is a PostgreSQL ad hoc (a collection of tables with unkown relationships) database for storage of structured data from CKAN resources. The DataStore makes individual data elements of a resource accessible and queryable. Data can be written incrementally to the DataStore through the API. The DataStore API is integrated into the CKAN API.
The DataPusher is a standalone web service that automatically downloads any tabular data files (e.g. CSV or Excel) from CanWIN's CKAN's resources when they are added to CanWIN, parses them to pull out the actual data, then uses the DataStore API to push the data into DataStore.
