ckan CKAN is the world’s leading open-source data portal platform. It is a complete out-of-the-box software solution that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organizations) wanting to make their data open and available. A slide-deck overview of CKAN can be found here.
CKAN is currently used by governments and user groups worldwide to power both official and community data portals. CKAN was developed by the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation to run TheDatahub.org, a public registry of open knowledge datasets. It now powers more than 40 data hubs around the world, including portals for local, national and international government, such as the UK’s data.gov.uk and the European Union’s publicdata.eu.
Technology
CKAN is built with Python on the backend and Javascript on the frontend, and uses The Pylons web framework and SQLAlchemy as its ORM. Its database engine is PostgreSQL and its search is powered by SOLR. It has a modular architecture that allows extensions to be developed to provide additional features such as harvesting or data upload.
CKAN uses its internal model to store metadata about the different records, and presents it on a web interface that allows users to browse and search this metadata. It also offers a powerful API that allows third-party applications and services to be built around it.