Session #41 of CKAN Monthly Live brought together contributors, implementers, and community members on June 17, 2026 — covering the new CKAN Ecosystem Catalog, a deep-dive into the Humanitarian Data Exchange and its Tabular Data Endpoints, the launch of the revived CKAN community forum, and an unconventional use case: a CKAN-powered sheet music directory with AI-assisted metadata management.
This recap covers each session topic in full. If you have a CKAN use case to share at a future session, there's a form in the meeting notes document.
Joel Natividad (datHere) demonstrated the new CKAN Ecosystem Catalog — a searchable directory of CKAN sites, extensions, and tools built to increase visibility across the ecosystem and make it easier for organisations to discover what's been built on CKAN worldwide. The catalog uses metadata schemas for categorisation and allows community members to register their own sites or curate existing entries.
The catalog is a starting point, not a finished product. Joel noted that it will improve as more sites are identified and added by the community. Planned next steps include integration with the new CKAN discussion forum, namespace collision checks, and exploration of linked data and federated search capabilities.
The catalog is an evolving starting point — it will improve as more sites are identified. Add yours.
Nadine Levin (OCHA / HDX) introduced the Humanitarian Data Exchange — a UN OCHA data product built on CKAN that serves approximately 250 organisations, hosting 20,000 datasets across 1,900 sources. The platform covers diverse formats including geospatial and tabular data, and has seen significant usage spikes during global crises including COVID-19 and the Ukraine conflict.
Tabular Data Endpoints (TDE) is HDX's newly launched feature providing stable API access to tabular resources via DataStore and the DataPusher Plus extension. TDE exposes search, SQL, and info endpoints — applied to curated, schema-stable datasets. Nadine demonstrated this live with Ebola case tracking data for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
HDX has also launched a new Gitbook with comprehensive API documentation and Python notebooks to help the community build pipelines and visualisations. Coming up on the HDX roadmap: an open API specification, a site-wide redesign, data dictionary integration, and technical schema enforcement to improve data quality at scale.
During Q&A, Ian Ward asked about schema enforcement and data validation for HDX pipelines. Nadine explained that HDX is exploring the Table Designer feature and drawing lessons from previous attempts — including the "Happy" project — to improve data interoperability.
HDX provides raw data access — but challenges remain around data complexity and context, especially in crisis situations where modelling is required for effective aid distribution.
Jamaica Jones (University of Pittsburgh / POSE programme) introduced the revived CKAN community discussion forum, hosted on the Open Knowledge Foundation's Discourse platform. The forum is designed for non-technical community conversations: funding, events, portal operations, community strategy — filling the gap that GitHub Discussions (support) and Gitter (developer chat) don't cover.
The forum is part of the NSF-funded POSE programme, which supports open-source ecosystem sustainability. It launches with the following structure:
Jamaica conducted a live collaborative activity during the session to surface shared interests and potential collaboration opportunities — findings will be shared back with the community on the forum. Joel Natividad encouraged everyone to register and contribute to early discussions, including upcoming topics like AI crawlers.
The forum is designed for the conversations that don't belong on GitHub — funding, events, portal operations, and community strategy.
Wolfgang Clauss (from Ondics) presented an unconventional CKAN use case: a sheet music directory extension that extends CKAN's metadata schema with musical attributes — instrument, part, composer, and style. Users can browse sheet music, play associated YouTube videos inline, export search results as CSV files, or package entire collections as tar/zip archives for use in mobile music apps.
AI-assisted metadata generation is the standout feature: users input a title and the system generates metadata suggestions — composer, style, description — via Google Gemini or OpenAI ChatGPT, dramatically reducing manual data-entry effort. The extension also redefines CKAN organisations as collections (digital songbooks), enabling sharing and importing of curated music sets between different CKAN instances equipped with the extension.
The extension will be released as open source and added to the Ecosystem Catalog. Wolfgang also previewed two upcoming projects: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for CKAN — due to be presented at the next CKAN Monthly Live session — and an Open Data App Store, a platform for hosting apps that consume open-source datasets. Both will be demonstrated at future sessions.
CKAN was never designed for sheet music — but the data model transfers perfectly. Instruments, composers, and styles are just metadata fields. Any structured collection of resources can be a CKAN dataset.
— Wolfgang Clauss, Ondics
The Ecosystem Catalog has a broken link in the interface — is it being fixed?
Joel Natividad confirmed the team was aware and committed to investigating. The catalog is in early stages — community reports are the fastest way to surface issues. If you spot a problem, flag it on the community forum.
How does HDX handle schema enforcement and data validation at scale?
Nadine Levin explained that HDX is exploring the Table Designer feature and drawing on lessons from previous attempts — including the "Happy" project — to improve data interoperability across its 1,900+ sources.
Community question
When will the sheet music extension and MCP server be available?
Wolfgang Clauss confirmed the sheet music extension will be released as open source and submitted to the Ecosystem Catalog. The MCP server for CKAN is scheduled for the next CKAN Monthly Live session.
There are three things you can do right now: register on the CKAN community forum and introduce yourself, add your CKAN site or extension to the Ecosystem Catalog, or help test CKAN 2.12 by picking up an open issue on GitHub.
If you have a CKAN use case — standard or unusual — we'd love to feature it at a future CKAN Monthly Live. Use the suggestion form in the meeting notes document to put your project forward. CKAN Monthly Live #42 takes place on the third Wednesday of July 2026.
CKAN 2.12 is the most significant release in years. The code is ready — what it ships as depends on how many people test it, translate it, and review the docs over the coming weeks.
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