[ckan-discuss] CKAN team latest

[Mark Wainwright]

This round-up of CKAN activity is cross-posted from ckan.org/blog.

As usual there’s plenty to report on CKAN development. Most of the
below is work that was too late to make it into the very imminent CKAN
1.6 release, but will be in the next release.

* Fixed vocabularies

Fixed-taxonomy tags are nearly ready. These will enable users to tag
datasets according to a fixed vocabulary, such as the World Wide Web
Consortium’s SKOS, the EU’s Eurovoc, the UK’s Integrated Public Sector
Vocabulary, or any fixed vocabulary you like, such as your favourite
selection of cheeses. John and Sean have been putting together and
testing the final touches, including an autocomplete function.
Meanwhile David Raznick has coded the mechanism for multilingual
translations for the fixed tags. More on this in a post coming soon,
but for now, there’s a sneak preview at
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/6774987836/>.

* Recline update

A new version of the Recline Data Explorer is now running on
theDataHub.org. Recline, from OKFN Labs, is an open-source tool like
Google Refine for exploring and visualising data from the comfort of
your browser. It’s used on the DataHub for browser-based visualisation
of structured data stored locally using CKAN’s Webstore extension.

* Control groups

Groups are becoming more flexible. Datasets can only be added to a
CKAN group by the group’s administrator. For some workflows, where
different data publishers have their own groups, it is convenient for
the administrator to have sole editing access to the datasets, too.
Hitherto this meant setting permissions for each dataset separately,
which was time-consuming, so Ross has created a new “Publisher mode”,
in which only a group administrator can edit datasets in the group.

* Pick your own

A CKAN repository can “harvest” or aggregate datasets from other
datahubs. At present only system administrators can manage harvest
sources, but the UK Location Project requested the ability for
individual publishers to manage their own harvest data. Adrià has
implemented this, and like all these open source features, it will be
included in CKAN so that other organisations can benefit too.

* Flying the flag

CKAN made an appearance at Dev8D, the conference for developers in
education and research. Rufus gave a live walkthrough of
thedatahub.org for working with data, and gave a general presentation
of CKAN. You can view the slides at

<https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AWboEOtcw2ZKZGd0ZmQ2NzhfMzlmOXBzazNkdg>

* Beyond CKAN

To enable users to mark the licensing restrictions on a dataset, CKAN
maintains a comprehensive list of open data licences (and a few
non-open ones). This useful list has now been split off and offered as
a separate simple Open Knowledge Foundation service,
licenses.opendefinition.org, providing information on over 100 open
licences. Have a look at the announcement at
<http://blog.okfn.org/2012/02/16/announcing-the-open-definition-licenses-service/>.

Finally, David Read leaves CKAN this week after over three years as a
developer. We’ll be sorry to see him go - best of luck to him from the
CKAN team in his future projects, and we hope he’ll keep in touch with
the CKAN world occasionally!


-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
ckan.org | @ckanproject