Blog

CKAN Activity

  • CKAN 1.5 finally got released on Wednesday and the dev team is very pleased! Lots of new features released: see the announcement http://ckan.org/2011/11/09/ckan-1-5-release/ It is great to also release an Ubuntu package, which we've already used to deploy eight CKAN servers.
  • Mozfest hit London last weekend, with three of the team there as a "Human API" for data.gov.uk. We helped hackers take advantage of the UK government data for various hacks related to Mozilla's theme "Media, Freedom and the Web". Aided by superb espresso and working in refreshingly modern facilities, it was great to work with data wranglers and data-driven journalists from around the world.
  • The allowable format for CKAN's tag (taxonomy for datasets) is being widened to allow spaces, capital letters and foreign characters. This is needed to accept tags in metadata imported from elsewhere - essential for projects where CKAN is used to aggregate datasets, such as publicdata.eu, IATI and data.gov.uk.
  • OKF's OpenSpending team provide an easy way to examine UK government spend http://data.gov.uk/openspending, and it turns out it's getting lots of use amongst the upper echelons of the government itself! So now we're improving the intergration of the app and giving the service a better server.
  • We're having a big push on harvesting of INSPIRE datasets for the UKLP project at the moment. Some improvements are rather technical - Adria just added something called 'harvesting multiple resource locators for each dataset.' but others are really visible to end users: we are currently doing some 'real-life' testing on the bounding box based geo-spatial search powered by PostGIS. It shouldn't be long before this goes public using UK data, and soon afterwards we'll have an international equivalent on thedatahub.org.
  • Activity Streams is a new feature being kicked off in CKAN by new developer, Sean. It will be a bit like what you get on your Github dashboard, to help publishers and data consumers keep track of datasets.
  • The QA Extension, which checks links, file sizes and formats, is being refactored by John to run off the Celery queue framework. This will help us cope with the sheer volume of links to process and allow us to slot in more background processing tasks, for which there are plenty of ideas!
  • The Groups Refactor work is now started, making datasets more clearly grouped by publisher or subject, and allows easier set-up of the permissions.
  • DataExplorer is being merged with Max Ogden's Recline, so browsing table data in Webstore with Google Refine-like controls - a really easy way to do data clean up and analysis. See Rufus' demo here: http://okfn.github.com/recline/
  • CKAN has now embraced Git, since more people know it these days, compared to Mercurial. The new repository is here: http://github.com/okfn/ckan
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