[ckan-discuss] Under the hood of CKAN

Wed May 4 09:48:43 BST 2011

CKAN.org Blog update
Under the hood of CKAN <http://ckan.org/2011/05/03/under-the-hood-of-ckan/>
By ADMIN <http://ckan.org/author/admin/> | Published: MAY 3, 2011 |
Edit<http://ckan.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=188>

*The following is a guest post from Christophe Guéret, member of the working
group on EU Open Data <http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/euopendata>*

CKAN.net is a community-based effort for creating an open catalog of public
datasets. Using the web site, everyone is free to register datasets thereby
stating their existence and the possible links between them along with extra
meta-data (license, author, …). One of the nice features of CKAN is that the
data about the datasets is stored in a structured, and consistent way. This
allows for a direct export of this information intoRDF
data<http://semantic.ckan.net/>.
It also seduced Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch who, last year, decided
to drop the wiki pages
(1<http://www.w3.org/wiki/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/DataSets/Statistics>
,2<http://www.w3.org/wiki/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/DataSets/LinkStatistics>)
they used to draw the LOD Cloud <http://lod-cloud.net/> in favor of CKAN.

In addition to storing structured data, CKAN also offers a convenient
API<http://wiki.ckan.net/API> for
accessing it. It’s a ReST API which also comes with several binding
interface for Python, PHP, Perl, … and make it easy to get a list of
packages matching some criteria. This API can, for instance, be employed to
get a list of packages tagged as ‘lod-cloud’ and render them using protovis
as shown by Ed Summers and Richard Cyganiak on this
site<http://inkdroid.org/lod-graph/>.
An other interesting use is to get the same data and reformat it into some
suitable for consumption by network analysis software (c.f. this blog
post<http://semweb4u.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/ckan-network-exporter-for-the-lod-cloud/>).
In plus of offering a wide range of visualisations for the network, these
software can also compute several metrics highlighting aspects of the graph
that can not be observed by looking at some nodes individually.

The original blog post contains two examples of rendering, the first
realised by Ed Summers and Richard Cyganiak (Animation of the LOD
Cloud<http://inkdroid.org/lod-graph/>,
rendering done by Protovis <http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/>).

The second realised by Rinke Hoekstra (Visualisation of the clusters in the
LOD Cloud, rendering done by Gephi <http://gephi.org/>).

To see the images, please check out the original
post<http://ckan.org/2011/05/03/under-the-hood-of-ckan/>on the CKAN
blog <http://ckan.org/blog/>.

If you haven’t tried it yet, go check the API and its
documentation<http://packages.python.org/ckan/api.html> and
start re-formating the data from CKAN.net to make something new out of
it [image:
;-)]

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
Skype: lucyfediachambers
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