[ckan-dev] CKAN and RDF/SPARQL

Wed May 25 00:30:54 UTC 2011

Hi List,

we are currently planing to employ CKAN for an open data platform for the city of Berlin, as well as for other cities in the context of the European "Open Cities" project. One of the technical issues that we are still unclear about concerns CKAN's support for RDF and SPARQL. More concretely, we wonder if a single instance of the CKAN software can provide the opportunity to access the meta data of datasets (source, author, etc.) in the RDF format; and furthermore, if it could be configured to provide a SPARQL endpoint to do this.

We know about the "semantic.ckan.net" website and the CKANRDF extension, but these seem to involve intermediary steps (e.g. polling the data at regular intervals and caching it at an independent location). We would like to be able to directly query a CKAN instance and get results back that are based on the current information stored in that instance (being able to query the "live" data, so to speak). 

Is anyone else interested in such a system ability? 
Do you know of any people that are already working on such a feature?

Cheers,
Ed
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Dr.-Ing. Edzard Höfig
Senior Research Engineer
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Fraunhofer FOKUS
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
D-10589 Berlin
phone: ++49-30-3463-7243 (fax: -8243)
web: www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/go/motion