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

Thu Mar 3 21:37:56 GMT 2011

2011/3/3 Jindřich Mynarz <mynarzjindrich at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,

Hi Jindrich! Great to hear from you.

> 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.

Sounds great.

> 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
-- 
Co-Founder, Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/

> 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

Given this activity you may also be interested in our Where Does My
Money Go? / OpenSpending project:

<http://wiki.openspending.org/>

> 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

I think there may be easier ways to integrate than using that module
which is rather heavy-weight. But we can talk about this further
(perhaps on ckan-dev).

> 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).

Sounds good. We've been doing  quite a bit recently in relation to
i18n and supporting multi-lingual data.

> 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.

Great. It would be great to talk further about this at the next
community meetup (next Wednesday):

<http://wiki.ckan.net/Meetups>

Rufus