[ckan-discuss] CKAN activity

[David Read]

Here's a taste of what's been going on this week with CKAN:


   - The CKAN development team made a splash at PyCon UK in Coventry, giving
   a talk, meeting other Python developers and doing a CKAN code sprint
   focussing on a couple of cool features mentioned below.


   - Following a community conference call last week on how to improve the
   Debian packaging of CKAN, James has been improving BuildKit and is set to
   announce a new debian package for the latest CKAN (1.3.4.1) in the next few
   days. Instead of having dedicated packages for each server name, we will
   have one package that all users can use and a parameterised script to set up
   the server. Announcement v. soon.


   - Adria has added a 'spatial' field to datasets, for details of *where* a
   dataset applies. The decision has been made to store the value as a
   latitude/longitude polygon in GeoJSON format. The code is in
   ckanext-spatial <https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-spatial>, it links up
   with INSPIRE, docs are imminent and we would like to get this on
   thedatahub.org soon to try out. So far spatial search is only available
   through the API, but we will add it to the web front-end, as well as display
   a map showing extent on each dataset page and lots of other cool features
   based on this.

<http://ckan.org/files/2011/09/dataset-map-demo.png>

   - Berlin Open Data - launched with CKAN under the hood. It provides a
   catalogue of 23 datasets so far, with an open license (CC-BY) for official
   data. Press releases:
Fraunhofer<http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/en/fokus/_fokusnews/_news_2011/_2011_09_09_OpenDataPortal.html>
   EPSI <http://www.epsiplus.net/news/news/berlin_launches_data_portal>.


   - A Belgian CKAN was requested by freelance journalist Mehmet Koksal who
   has opened up election spending data. Friedrich setup http://be.ckan.net the
   same day (!) and datasets are starting to be registered there already. (This
   is in addition to the official Belgian site being developed with Drupal &
   CKAN by Bart Hanssens.)


   - Antoine Logean needed only 10 minutes to set up a new CKAN install on
   Amazon EC2 using our instructions: http://make.opendata.ch It's for an
   upcoming Swiss hack day and he's already planning a groovy visualisation
   using the CKAN API.
Message<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2011-September/001290.html>


   - datacatalogs.org now lists 140 government data sites around the world.
   It was launched in the summer by the OKF following a meeting of open data
   experts in Edinburgh. The site runs on CKAN and Jonathan is pushing to
   expose more features now, enabling the editors to group sites by continent
   and to record links to bulk downloads, and John is looking at implementing
   this. Message<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-discuss/2011-September/001704.html>


   - Jilly has been talking to potential CKAN partners to support CKAN
   installations. Any more like-minded consultancies around the world are
   welcome to join in spreading the message. Contact: jilly.mathews at okfn.org


   - We're interested to see software guru Ward Cunningham's work in
   publishing open data: http://wardcunningham.github.com/ (flagged up by
   Friedrich)


   - Interest is building for OGD Camp 2011 in Warsaw
<http://ogdcamp.org/> during
   October with the LOD2 group announcing the Linked Government Data
   workshop<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2011-September/001294.html>.
There
   will also a CKAN workshop there too, run by David. Come along - it is
   certainly going to be the biggest event for Government data ever!

David
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