[ckan-dev] CKAN now is available on MS Azure China with optimized OData plugin

[FENG GAO]

Dear CKAN dev community:

I just got notified that Microsoft Open Tech China just announced its new
Azure-based CKAN solution for China. Some of you might be interested in
this.

Here is the announcement:

*MS Open Tech China Introduces Azure-Based Open Data Solution Using CKAN
and OData Technologies*

 Today, MS Open Tech China released a new, open data solution for Microsoft
Azure built around CKAN, an open source data portal, and an optimized OData
plugin developed to specific requirements for the Chinese market. This
solution leverages important technology components from the China software
development market with a performant cloud platform to provide open source
developers easy access and publishing tools with prevailing open data
sources.



*Unveiling CKAN in China with Brand-New OData Plug-ins*



On October 21, MS Open Tech’s OData Plug-in contributions
<https://github.com/whythawk/ckanext-odata/pull/4> to GitHub were
officially accepted by the CKAN community. This integrated technology not
only extends CKAN’s reach to global markets, but it also enhances
interoperability between popular data processing applications such as Excel
and OData – an open data protocol endorsed by several major IT vendors,
including IBM, SAP and Microsoft.



“These contributions from MS Open Tech China help to add i18n support for
non-English users and improve interoperability between CKAN and MS Office,“
said Gavin Chait, Lead Consultant at Whythawk, a core CKAN development and
consulting company, “We believe that the wider CKAN community will benefit
from the enhancements now available through these tools, reinforcing CKAN
as a premier open data publishing solution for customers around the world.”



Thanks to these code contributions, CKAN’s OData plug-in tools now offer
Unicode support, enabling CKAN to extend its global reach into markets
where languages require double-byte coding. As a result, it is now possible
for Chinese government officials, public workers and business professionals
to use familiar tools such as Microsoft Excel to access and to process
millions of data files.





*One-Click Deployment of CKAN Images through VM Depot *



CKAN <http://ckan.org/> is an open source data portal solution
developed by Open
Knowledge <http://okfn.org/> for data publishers. With CKAN, data
publishers can easily publish data for Internet users and developers to
query, visualize, download, and call data resources through APIs. Now more
than 116 data portals have been built based on CKAN, including the
well-known data.gov US government site and data.gov.uk in the United
Kingdom.



Thanks to VM Depot <https://vmdepot.msopentech.cn/List/Index?lang=en-us>,
Microsoft Open Technologies’ catalog of open source images for Microsoft
Azure, Web developers can also take advantage of the Azure cloud platform
to deploy CKAN images and publish data quickly and easily. Collaboration
between Microsoft Open Tech China and Beijing Shuhai Technology Inc. has
yielded an array of OData plug-in features in CKAN that have been optimized
for the China market, and then converted into VM images that have also been
published to the VM Depot China site
<https://vmdepot.msopentech.cn/List/Index?lang=en-us>.



Since the Beijing Municipal Government launched the first China Government
Open Data Portal <http://www.bjdata.gov.cn/> in 2012, an increasing number
of government data sources have opened up to the public - and specifically
to open source developers - through a variety of local and national data
portals. As an active participant in China’s open source ecosystem, MS Open
Tech is also a contributor to several Open Data initiatives promoted by
Chinese government. We are committed to supporting Chinese developers and
users to realize the full potential of open data.





*Here are the complete instructions
<https://github.com/msopentechcn/docs/blob/master/ckan-vmdepot-tutorial-en.md>
to launch an Open Data Solution from VM Depot*



For any question or suggestions, please feel free to reach us at
msopentechcn at microsoft.com . We look forward to hearing from you!





*About OData*



OData is a short term for Open Data Protocol. As a REST-based industry
standard approved by OASIS, OData simplifies the querying，sharing and
re-using of data across enterprise applications, cloud, and mobile devices.
With OData, information can be retrieved from a variety of sources
including relational databases, file systems, content management systems,
as well as traditional websites.



-- 
Feng GAO <http://about.me/feng_gao> | @okfncnfenggao
<http://twitter.com/okfncnfenggao> | skype: fenggaosh
mobile: 86-13764007565 | wechat: fenggaosh
Ambassador for China, Open Knowledge

Open Data China (开放数据中国） <http://opendatachina.com>| @开放数据中国
<http://weibo.com/opendatachina>
Advocate, Cultivate, and Support Open Data Innovation

Open Knowledge China (开放知识基金会中国) <http://cn.okfn.org>
Weibo: @开放知识中国 <http://weibo.com/okfncn> |Twitter: @okfncn
<http://twitter.com/okfncn>
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