Blog

CKAN activity

  • David Read
  • 30 Sep 2011
Here's a taste of what's been going on this week with CKAN:
  • The CKAN development team made a splash at PyCon UK in Coventry, giving a talk, meeting other Python developers and doing a CKAN code sprint focussing on a couple of cool features mentioned below.
  • Following a community conference call last week on how to improve the Debian packaging of CKAN, James has been improving BuildKit and is set to announce a new debian package for the latest CKAN (1.3.4.1) in the next few days. Instead of having dedicated packages for each server name, we will have one package that all users can use and a parameterised script to set up the server. Announcement v. soon.
  • Adria has added a 'spatial' field to datasets, for details of where a dataset applies. The decision has been made to store the value as a latitude/longitude polygon in GeoJSON format. The code is in ckanext-spatial, it links up with INSPIRE, docs are imminent and we would like to get this on thedatahub.org soon to try out. So far spatial search is only available through the API, but we will add it to the web front-end, as well as display a map showing extent on each dataset page and lots of other cool features based on this.
  • Berlin Open Data - launched with CKAN under the hood. It provides a catalogue of 23 datasets so far, with an open license (CC-BY) for official data. Press releases: Fraunhofer EPSI.
  • A Belgian CKAN was requested by freelance journalist Mehmet Koksal who has opened up election spending data. Friedrich setup http://be.ckan.net the same day (!) and datasets are starting to be registered there already. (This is in addition to the official Belgian site being developed with Drupal & CKAN by Bart Hanssens.)
  • Antoine Logean needed only 10 minutes to set up a new CKAN install on Amazon EC2 using our instructions: http://make.opendata.ch It's for an upcoming Swiss hack day and he's already planning a groovy visualisation using the CKAN API. Message
  • datacatalogs.org now lists 140 government data sites around the world. It was launched in the summer by the OKF following a meeting of open data experts in Edinburgh. The site runs on CKAN and Jonathan is pushing to expose more features now, enabling the editors to group sites by continent and to record links to bulk downloads, and John is looking at implementing this. Message
  • Jilly has been talking to potential CKAN partners to support CKAN installations. Any more like-minded consultancies around the world are welcome to join in spreading the message. Contact: jilly.mathews@okfn.org
  • Interest is building for OGD Camp 2011 in Warsaw during October with the LOD2 group announcing the Linked Government Data workshop. There will also a CKAN workshop there too, run by David. Come along - it is certainly going to be the biggest event for Government data ever!
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