[ckan-discuss] News from the CKAN team

[Mark Wainwright]

(Crossposted from http://ckan.org/2012/02/07/news-from-the-ckan-team/)

It's been a big week for CKAN, starting with the announcement[1] that
CKAN will power a new data portal for the European Commission. This
will be a big push for open data in Europe. It will be good for CKAN
too, since as part of the agreement we will be developing a number of
new features, including closer working with visualisations, better
Drupal integration, and more support for multi-lingual content. Of
course, once developed, all new features will be available to be
deployed on your favourite CKAN server.

[1] http://ckan.org/2012/01/30/ckan-to-power-new-ec-portal/

Development work

There's lots of development work in progress. Here's a round-up:

David has started working on the multi-lingual support. Although the
CKAN interface is translated into many languages, there is not very
good support yet for *content* in multiple languages. He's been
looking at making search deal intelligently with multi-lingual content
and search requests, and at better ways to store translations of
dataset records.

James and Adria have been adding some features to the UK Location
Programme[2], a project that allows a range of government departments,
agencies, etc to publish geographic data into the (CKAN-powered) data
portal data.gov.uk. UKLP pulls in datasets from other sources using an
extension to CKAN. Users of this have been asking for new management
features for data publishers, and these will be ready in a couple of
weeks' time.

[2] http://location.defra.gov.uk/

Ian is working on various improvements to the web form for editing
datasets, including an autosave feature, in-form checking of data
URLs, and fancier autocompletes. The features have been requested by
data.gov.uk, but as usual will be available for other CKAN instances
once they are released.

Finally, the CKAN source code[3] will be branched this week for the
CKAN 1.6 release. This will include the new Authorisation API, and the
ability to mount CKAN at a non-root URL - features requested by CKAN
site owners in Brazil and Germany. We're also trying to ensure as many
UI improvements as possible are finished in time for the branch.

[3] https://github.com/okfn/ckan

The design side

Sam, our new designer, has been working on a smarter look for ckan.org
and the community instance at thedatahub.org. If you know of any rough
edges you'd like to see cleaned up, get in touch! E-mail the mailing
list or tweet to @ckanproject.

Also on ckan.org, Mark has expanded and rearranged the Features
section[4]. Read more about topics such as catalogue federation,
CKAN's wonderful API, easy theming and why being Open Source is
important.

[4] http://ckan.org/features/

New CKANs, new users

Last but by no means least, there is also news on the user front.

publicdata.eu is a CKAN portal that sucks in ("federates") datasets
from portals in various EU countries. As of last week these include
the Berlin Open Data portal, daten.berlin.de.

datacatalogs.org is a list of data catalogues, itself powered by CKAN,
that keeps on growing. Last week's additions were official catalogues
in Portugal[5] and Chile[6], and community-run ones at criik.com, a
pan-South American version, and catalog.opendata.in.th in Thailand.

[5] http://dados.gov.pt
[6] http://datos.gob.cl

Finally, Ira gave a presentation on CKAN at an open data workshop that
was held in Estonia, where a CKAN open data portal is due to be
launched soon.


-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
Skype: m.wainwright