[ckan-discuss] Latest news from CKAN

[Mark Wainwright]

Happy new year to all CKANistas! Yesterday, 18 January, was CKAN’s
fifth birthday – five years to the day since Rufus made the first
commit to the CKAN code repository - <http://bit.ly/xQszk7>. It’s good
to see that in the intervening 5 years, the project and the number of
contributors has really taken off. Here is a roundup of recent
activity:

Open Data in Serbia is getting a big push, now that the Pipin
Institute in Belgrade have setup a CKAN instance running in Serbian
(in Latin and Cyrillic character sets). Preview it at
<http://rs.ckan.net>.

The data preview functionality is improving. Rufus has changed it to
use a different library (backbone.js) and improved the UI. You can
view the data as a table and filter or transform columns (à la Google
Refine), and it also provides a quick graph. Try the demo at
<http://okfnlabs.org/recline/demo/index.html> .

publicdata.eu, a CKAN server that aggregates metadata from all around
Europe is having an upgrade by Adrià. There are a variety of
‘harvesters’ which scrape from other sites that need fixing up to work
with the latest CKAN, and we’re adding some more (such as the new
Serbian site!) and upgrading to the latest version of CKAN.

We’ve been advertising for a Project Manager (see
<http://okfn.org/jobs/#project-manager-ckan-role-description>) and Ira
has been looking at applications coming in so far.

Activity Streams are an exciting new feature that is starting to
become visible in our UI. It’s like the news feed on Facebook (or
GitHub) for datasets and users that you are interested in. It’s Sean’s
first feature since joining us (welcome, Sean!). We should have it up
on the test server in a couple of days to start getting feedback.

Adrià has also been working on CKAN’s new geospatial features. Have a
look at a sneak preview of selecting datasets of interest by
geographical area, using a map interface at
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/6721538795/>.

(Cross-posted from <http://ckan.org/blog> - follow us there or
@CKANproject on Twitter!)

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