How to use the OGP Toolbox for your own project?

Hello.

I am caasi from Taiwan. I am working on a project hub for g0v called YA0H. I am still working on the GitHub login part of my project.

Johan introduced the OGP toolbox to me. It can easily add any meta data to any project. I think I have to understand it’s structure so I can use it in my project without write my own. Where should I start first?

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Hello @caasi! Thank you for your message, it’s a nice beginning to our collaboration. :slight_smile:

The code of the OGP Toolbox is available here (UI) and here (API).

We’d really love to see g0v projects hosted in the OGP Toolbox. Please tell us how we can help you do that.
Do you think it would be possible to use our database to store your projects? this way you wouldn’t have to create your own backend and you could focus your energy to develop an awesome frontend for your hub. Which is also exactly where we’re lacking. :wink: We really need to work on the interface (see this issue for example, or this one). Let’s share our efforts!

@PierreLalu also has a similar project to launch an alternative Toolbox: same database, another frontend for a different audience. (See the discussion here.)

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Hey sweethearts !

Yes I am fantasizing a toolbox made for people, less for startupers and administrations as (UX and wording speaking) the OGP toolbox looks like.

The toolbox I want to create with OGPtoolbox materials shall at first manage tools through User types : militancy, grass roots groups, coopératives etc… It shall share open source digital tools but also in real life methodologies (how to organise strike, do live collaboratives processes, create a food coop etc…) And manage to be able to talk and propose solutions for the less equiped and easy with digital matters.

If you do something of the same I’ll be happy to bridge it up !

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The Clarity Marketplace, an initiative currently funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program, is a database of “Open eGovernment Services” - tools & use cases - which is similar to what the OGP Toolbox is doing.
I’ve talked with Ivonne Jansen-Dings and Johan Groenen (Waag / Code for NL) who work on this project, they’re exploring ways to use the OGP Toolbox to keep the content of the Clarity Marketplace once the platform closes in early 2018.

This could be possible depending on different technical considerations and possibilities of the OGP Toolbox.
Here are some of Johan’s remarks and questions on this specific subject:

I notice that your api returns a lot of id’s instead of the actual data
If i GET /collections for example, I don’t seem to get the basic information about the entries (name, image url, …)
Why are you using all those number(string)s for values, for example in the “properties” object, instead of using the actual property values?

Milo van der Linden, our friend at Code for Europe, made a similar suggestion:

The API would benefit from a couple of more readable, aggregated result endpoints that would make interchanging collections and cards easier.

Hi,

My advice is to do this HTTP request: https://api.ogptoolbox.org/collections?show=values&depth=1

You’ll see a top-level values key, in which you can resolve property IDs for keys and values.

I agree that a tutorial is lacking about the use of the API.

As a background, keep in mind that data is stored as a graph, and that the API returns the nodes and the links, mainly for factorization reasons.

Also, namings are not always similar between the frontend and the backend. For example, in the frontend, you’ll find “softwares”, “use cases” and “organizations”, but in the backend, they are all “cards”, with a type.

Regards

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