[ckan-dev] CKAN/OpenSpending integration

[Tryggvi Björgvinsson]

Hi all,

I just posted a small blog post on the CKAN blog about two extensions
that were made possible with the recent 2.3 release:

http://ckan.org/2015/03/20/presenting-public-finance-just-got-easier/

In the new release we now have the possibility to extend resources
(files) in the same way we have been able to extend packages (datasets).
This opens up the possibility to process uploaded files and do something
with them.

One of the extensions adds four fields to the the resource page in order
to from there create something called budget data package (a
standardised format for budget data publications)[1]. This makes
integrations between CKAN and other budget systems very easy.

The second extension takes the standardised budget data package (if
published) and posts that to OpenSpending via its budget data package API.

So it's now really easy to go from a budget file to an OpenSpending
visualisation, and the only interface needed for managing it is CKAN
(you still need to set up the OpenSpending visualisation site but that's
very easy with the OpenSpendingJS visualisation library).

We've already tested this with the Mexico 2015 budget which I then
visualised with a demo here:
http://tryggvib.github.io/mexican-budget-data-package

It's basically a really simple html site, code here:
https://github.com/tryggvib/mexican-budget-data-package/blob/gh-pages/index.html

Just thought I'd let you all know :)

/Tryggvi

[1] http://fiscal.dataprotocols.org/