dataverse-metrics

Introduction

dataverse-metrics aggregates metrics from Dataverse installations around the world and visualizes them on a web page. It makes use of the Dataverse Metrics API that was added in Dataverse 4.9.

If you are looking for visualizations for a single installation of Dataverse, please see https://github.com/gdcc/dv-metrics

Requirements

• Python 2 (deprecated) or Python 3
• Apache web server or similar
• a web browser

Installation

Put code into place

Change to the parent directory for where you will install dataverse-metrics. /var/www/html is the default "DocumentRoot" for Apache on CentOS (defined in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) and is suggested as a place to install dataverse-metrics, but you are welcome to install it wherever you want and use any server you want.

cd /var/www/html

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-metrics.git

Change to the directory you just created by cloning the repo:

cd dataverse-metrics

Configuration

Copy config.json.sample to config.json and edit the following values:

• installations: An array of Dataverse installation URLs.
• api_response_cache_dir: Fully qualified directory where JSON files representing API responses will be stored.
• aggregate_output_dir: Fully qualified directory where TSV output files of aggregated metrics will be stored.
• num_months_to_process: For monthly metrics, the number of months to go back in time to download metrics from each Dataverse installation.
• month_filter_enabled: If you have num_months_to_process set high (e.g. 36 months) the dates will disappear from the bottom of the bar charts. Changing this boolean to true will make only even months appear and with fewer bars the dates will be visible.
• endpoints: An array of Metrics API endpoints to process. Note that the two types are single (i.e. datasets/bySubject) and monthly (i.e. downloads/toMonth). (You will notice a third type called monthly_itemized in config.json.sample but it is not yet supported.)
• blacklists: Arrays of terms to blacklist. Only the datasets/bySubject endpoint can have a blacklist.
• colors: A single color for bar charts and a palette of colors for tree maps.
• github_repos: An array of GitHub repos such as https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse. A line will be added per repo about the number of contributors.

Aggregating metrics

Now that your config.json file is ready, run the metrics.py script to create a TSV file for each of the endpoints and a contributors.json file for the github_repos, all of which will be placed in the aggregate_output_dir directory:

python3 metrics.py

(Please note that if you don't have Python 3 installed, Python 2 should work fine too but Python 3 is highly recommended because Python 2 will not be maintained past January 1, 2020 according to https://pythonclock.org and PEP 373.)

Viewing the visualizations

Using the instructions above, index.html has been placed at /var/www/html/dataverse-metrics/index.html and should be available on your Apache server at http://example.com/dataverse-metrics/index.html

Adding additional installations

The list of Dataverse installations depends on all-dataverse-installations.json which can be updated with the following script as new installations are added to the map produced by dataverse-installations:

./update-all-installations-list.sh

Updating Metrics

To update your metrics periodically, you'll want to queue up a shell script in some flavor of cron.

Here's an example shell script to get you started.

On a Red Hat or CentOS system, you might drop a file like update_metrics.cron into /etc/cron.d/ to update on a specified schedule.

Contributing

We love contributors! Please see our Contributing Guide for ways you can help and check out the to do list below.

To Do

• Drop support for Python 2. See https://python3statement.org