[ckan-discuss] Life on planet CKAN

Wed Jan 25 16:46:06 GMT 2012

Cross-posted from <http://ckan.org/blog>)

Life has been busy as ever on planet CKAN. Here’s a round-up of this
week’s news.

* There will be some CKAN folk at the London Open Data Meetup next
Monday night, the 30th of January, at 7pm: see <http://bit.ly/yN2dj1>.
There are also some really interesting looking talks. Come and say hi.

* The International Aid Transparency Initiative
(http://iatiregistry.org/) is a registry of aid data powered by CKAN.
It’s just got some exciting new features: new search filters, more
information on the dataset listings, and Atom feeds which you can use
to keep in touch with changes on the site. You can follow changes on
the whole registry or for a specific publisher or country (or in fact
any search results).

* The Estonian government is using CKAN to build an open data portal
to be released this month. Ira is off to Tallinn later in the month to
present at an open data workshop organised to mark the launch.

* We’ve started to design how fixed taxonomies could work in CKAN,
taking some ideas from Drupal and beyond. At present, datasets in CKAN
can be simply tagged with free-form tags. This is flexible and useful,
but fixed taxonomies are also valuable. We’re keen to use it to have a
central list of countries, and some sites want to use the Eurovoc
subject categories. No doubt plenty more vocabularies will be useful –
let us know!

* it.ckan.net has been given an upgrade, after Italian data wrangler
Stefano Costa wanted to evaluate CKAN’s first batch of geo-spatial
features. See them in action at
<http://it.ckan.net/dataset/comune-bologna-bilanci-consuntivi>. Next
steps are to enable input and search using the map directly.

* There are big changes under way to group pages, which will become
more like home pages for the group, with the ability to search within
the group and even its own web sub-domain (like
http://mygroup.thedatahub.org). CKAN user Richard Cyganiak made lots
of great suggestions; more info at <http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1521>.

* There will be an open Skype meeting on “Linked Data + CKAN” on 2nd
February, at 5pm UTC. For more info or to attend, see the etherpad at
<http://ckan.okfnpad.org/meetup-2012-02-02>.

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