News from the CKAN team 19 April 2012

Here's an update on what the CKAN team have been doing lately. It's been a while since the last one and we've been busy, so there's plenty to report.

Features

• Adrià has implemented a great map view in Recline, CKAN's built-in data viewer. If some structured data resource contains latitude and longitude information, this will enable it to be viewed on a map from within CKAN. A sneak preview is here (select the 'map' view).

• Ross has done some work on a 'Related Stuff' extension, to allow you to link a dataset to other things (an app, a news article, etc) that use it. (We're not sure about the name - suggestions welcome!)

• Ross has been improving CKAN groups (which are becoming 'Organizations'). These will link together both users and datasets to give fine control over access to datasets within a group, and enable better workflow for data publishing organisations.

• David has finished working on a CKAN extension for Google Docs, allowing users to upload, download and edit CKAN resources from a Google Docs spreadsheet. More info on this coming soon!

• Ian has been getting ATOM feeds working, enabling users to get updates on changes to datasets or groups of interest.

CKAN sites

• Adrià's also fixed some problems with the IATI extension, used to run the aid data registry by the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

• We've done various bits of work for the forthcoming EC portal. Among other things, Toby has fixed some internationalisation issues, John has worked on the theme and user interface, and Ross has worked on importing and exporting records in RDF format.

Other news

• Mark and Ira went to the plenary meeting in Vienna of the LOD2 project - a research and development project on Linked Data, of which CKAN is a small but important part. There is a post on the overview session on the OKFN blog.

• The next release of CKAN will be version 1.7. We hope to be able to release it on 2 May.