Implement a 'delete dataset' register

[mightymax]

Currently users can submit their dataset using the API. The crawler removes a dataset if it is no longer available (if I understand correctly). There might be reasons for users to remove their dataset from the registry even though it still available. Users should be able to send a DELETE request on the API endpoint to delete their dataset.

The difficulty with deleting datasets using the API of course is unauthenticated use. Currently the API has no use authentication implemented. It might be worth considering implementing a JSON Web Tokens authorization/authentication scheme.

[ddeboer]

Hey @mightymax, interesting suggestion.

There might be reasons for users to remove their dataset from the registry even though it still available.

Keep in mind that you can keep the datasets themselves available, and serve a 410 from the registration URL only, i.e. the URL containing the dataset description that you submitted to the Register.

Still, you might want to keep those descriptions too, but have them removed from the Register. A solution is to register a catalog instead of individual dataset descriptions. If you then remove datasets from that catalog, the Register will pick up on that.

Of course, we already have a non-scaling, low-tech ‘solution’: dataset publishers can contact us, mailing from their organisation e-mail address, to have a dataset manually removed from the register.

Finally, please note that we don’t remove datasets from the Register yet; see #813.

[mightymax]

Thanks for your response @ddeboer! I will have to settle for the low-tech ‘solution’, old-school contact-forms rule!