[ckan-discuss] Introduction + planned use of CKAN in Czech Rep

Thu Mar 3 09:12:33 GMT 2011

Hi all,

I've recently join the ckan-discuss mailing list, so allow me to 
introduce myself and also the Czech open data initiative I'm part of. 
I'm Jindrich Mynarz, currently a student of New media at the Charles 
University in Prague and part-time employee of the National Technical 
Library. I'm a member of the informal OpenData.cz initiative that has 
recently started [1] (for now, the website is available only in Czech).

We plan to use the CKAN instance for Czech Republic [3] as a catalogue 
for Czech datasets in two main ways.

First, we plan to use CKAN to document and map existing (not necessarily 
open) datasets from the Czech public sector. This is a small project 
executed by the University of Economics, Prague, that will start during 
this month. It's aim is to catalog the available datasets produced by 
the public sector bodies in Czech Republic.

Second, we want to use it to build a catalogue of the open datasets that 
will come out of the projects originating from OpenData.cz. Since the 
start of the initiative, we have two primary projects. The first deals 
with publishing spending data in tabular format for small cities. There 
will be around 10 cities involved in the start of this project. The 
second is a collaboration with the Czech Office for National Statistics 
[3] in which we aim to convert some of their codelists to linked open data.

Since OpenData.cz is a website based on Drupal 7, we want to investigate 
the possibility of incorporating CKAN data in it via the module for 
Drupal developed in the UK [4]. Also, we plan to examine CKAN's 
internationalization features [5] and the implementation of the dcat 
vocabulary [6] because of the requirements defined for the project for 
the mapping of available datasets, which will start at the University of 
Economics, Prague. In the course of mapping of the datasets we aim to 
provide each dataset with rich metadata [7] (i.e., dcat description) and 
multilingual package description (i.e., internationalization features).

We'll be starting to work with CKAN in the course of this spring and I 
hope to see a growing number of open datasets listed in Czech CKAN in 
the coming months.

Best,

Jindrich

Jindrich Mynarz
National Technical Library, Prague
Technicka 6/2710
160 80  Praha 6
Czech Republic

Phone: +420 232 002 448
Skype ID: jindrich.mynarz
E-mail: jindrich.mynarz at techlib.cz
Web: http://www.techlib.cz/en

[1] http://www.opendata.cz
[2] http://cz.ckan.net
[3] http://czso.cz/eng/redakce.nsf/i/home
[4] http://data.gov.uk/blog/datagovuk-releases-open-source-code
[5] http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/i18n#DeployingaTranslation
[6] http://vocab.deri.ie/dcat
[7] http://wiki.ckan.net/RDF_and_CKAN