[ckan-discuss] Where do city and other governments store their CKAN data?

[Ross Jones]

Hi,

On 19 Mar 2014, at 13:52, Mark Boyd <mark at mgboyd.com> wrote:
> I am a follower of CKAN and have written about the platform several times for ProgrammableWeb. I am currently working on an article about the new FI-Ware open source platform that i understand will partner with CKAN in the near future. FI-Ware is, in part, aiming to set up data centers to provide governments (and others) with independent distributed data storage solutions for their smart cities projects, and for storage of their open data platforms.

I’m glad you explained what FI-Ware is, I went to http://www.fi-ware.org/ and was more confused than I was before, it isn’t really clear what it is from the homepage.

When you say 'partner with CKAN', do you mean the CKAN association (http://ckan.org/2014/03/18/introducing-the-ckan-association/) or the OKFN Services team (http://ckan.org/services/)? As far as I am aware they are, or are soon to be, distinct entities.

> This leads me to ask existing CKAN users: How do you manage your CKAN instances and open data storage now? Are you using cloud storage (Amazon?) or internal servers? If open data is to grow and at a (smart-) city level is to include sensor data in realtime, what storage needs will you have and what is the current thinking to solve this challenge?

On data.gov.uk we use actual hardware rather than hosting in the cloud, there are various reasons for this but mostly political rather than technical. All of our storage is currently local to our infrastructure although we don’t have a requirement for ‘realtime’ or sensor data.  Storing large amounts of sensor data is rather specialised and I think I agree with Antoine in that using something specialised for that task would be sensible, although some level of integration with CKAN is feasible but I’m not sure what form it might take outside of viewing/previewing that data. Obviously, just my personal opinion, but I think in some cases just a stand-alone CKAN is not enough, the real payoff is the extensibility and services *around* CKAN. Looking forward to see what form the FI-Ware partnership takes.

Cheers

Ross.
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