New CKAN data portals

The last few months have seen a lot of activity in Open Data round the world, and a corresponding clutch of new CKAN data hubs and portals in Austria, Brazil, the US, and elsewhere. Here is a quick roundup. There is a (fairly) complete list of all CKAN portals here.

Brazil

The Brazilian government now has an official open data portal at dados.gov.br. It was built with CKAN by the Ministry of Planning, with help from the Brazilian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Brazilian Senate has also used CKAN to set up its own open data portal.

Argentina

The new Open Government Office of Buenos Aires, under its director Rudi Borrmann, started looking last year at the possibility of building an open data portal. CKAN's open source credentials recommended it and the result was data.buenosaires.gob.ar which went live earlier this year.

Austria

Austria has a strong open data movement, reflected in the number of city-level data portals. The Open Knowledge Foundation's Austrian Chapter has been active in this area. The Graz open data site, built with OpenCms, uses CKAN as a back-end for its data search, and also exposes CKAN directly at ckan.data.graz.gv.at. The city of Linz uses the same approach. The new national Austrian open data portal, another CKAN site, harvests metadata from a number of city-level portals. Austrian CKAN partner the Semantic Web Company has supported the national and Linz sites.

Italy

Two new official regional portals have recently appeared in Italy, for the Province of Rome and for Tuscany. The latter, Open Data Regione Toscana, is the most recent addition to the CKAN stable, officially launched this week.

US

One of the longest-running sites using CKAN in the US is OpenColorado, run by a local volunteer data community. The same organisation - described on its website as "like a think tank, educational resource, and open source technology community all rolled into one" - has now been instrumental in setting up one of the latest, an official portal for the city of Denver.

UK

Another long-running CKAN site is data.gov.uk. However the site was re-launched last month after a thorough overhaul. For the first time, CKAN's dataset searching and browsing pages are directly visible to the user.

Slovakia

Finally, the new official data portal for Slovakia went online earlier this year, timed to coincide with the Open Data event, From crisis of trust to open governance, in the capital Bratislava in March.