Storage Extension for CKAN

Today we're announcing the release of an important new feature for CKAN: integrated upload and storage support for datasets. Until now CKAN has been limited to being a catalog -- a place to list datasets but not to store them. Now you can upload datasets directly or as part of the process of registering a data package. From our own experience, we know it's really useful to be able to store material in this way and users have also been telling us this. Moreover, storage and a catalog are natural complements: when storing material you usually want to have a 'catalog' and when registering datasets one often wants to be able to upload material. We also think that storage will be an essential facility for other tools that wish to build on CKAN -- for example tools that transform, integrate or enrich existing datasets. That's why, in addition to having a standard web upload facility, there's also a rich set of APIs including the ability to get and set metadata and acquire authentication credentials -- something that will allow third party tools in possession of a valid CKAN API key to do direct uploads (we've already got an active discussion about direct uploads from Google Refine). Lastly we should emphasize this is a beta release and there are still improvements to be made so if you spot a bug or have an idea for an improvement please let us know.

Screenshots

More Info

• Documentation: <http://packages.python.org/ckanext-storage/>
• PyPI: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ckanext-storage>
• Code repo: <http://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-storage>

You can try out uploading a file on the CKAN demo instance at (you will need to login -- use tester / tester as username and password): <http://test.ckan.net/storage/upload>