[ckan4rdm] CKAN as research data repository

Thu Oct 23 14:04:40 UTC 2014

Hi Florian,
I realize this is a year old message, but we are trying also to use CKAN as a data repository.  I am a biologist at the University of Manitoba in Manitoba, Canada and am managing a new data network designed to store and serve out open access scientific data about the Lake Winnipeg Basin, which covers 4 Canadian provinces and 4 US States.  We are currently exploring options to migrate the data server portion from the MS visual basic programming it was originally designed in (due to Federal government restrictions of the time) to an architecture that will fit at the University.  CKAN is looking like a good option except I don't have much programming experience, nor does our computer services with this kind of software and no budget to hire outside help at this time. I have tried installing CKAN from the instructions on the CKAN website, including using virtual servers for Ubuntu 12.04, as well as trying from source code using Ubuntu 14, AND trying the data.gov.uk package, but none of these have been successful.  I am wondering if you have an updated link for your code and instructions as I see the current links no longer exist?

I currently have a test version of CKAN working in the cloud on Acquia but this is not a viable long term solution for us.

Thanks,
Claire

Hi everyone,

we're setting up CKAN for RDM for a Marine Research and Monitoring group
within a state government department in Western Australia. We've got
additional constraints as we deal with sensitive data about threatened
species and communities. We'll be looking at maintaining proper ISO 13139 /
ANZLIC MCP metadata on a CKAN-harvested GeoNetwork catalog for spatially
referenced datasets, but first need to get our scientists' heads around the
paradigm change from spreadsheets to CKAN.

The selling points of CKAN were the user community, the intuitive GUI, the
search performance, and the filestore/datastore plus API. With a more
technical end user audience we could have used a GeoNetwork / GeoServer /
Thredds stack, but our main data manipulation paradigm is still the trusty
spreadsheet, an internal Wiki for knowledge management and R / Python /
Latex for report automation.

Our servers run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS VMs with a few home-made application
hosting conventions beyond CKAN's default settings / ports / directories.
To take some of the headache out of the manual installation and
customization steps, we've created a fabric script [0] to automate the
setup (incl file store, data store and spatial preview). I've also added
the setup of initial orgs, groups and users (datasets and resources to
follow) using the API [1].
Feel free to take our installer for a spin, and I'd highly value your
opinion and feedback!

[0] Code repository https://bitbucket.org/dpaw/yes_you_ckan/overview
[1] Installation instructions
https://bitbucket.org/dpaw/yes_you_ckan/wiki/Home

Cheers,
Florian

Claire Herbert
Coordinator
Lake Winnipeg Basin Information Network

Centre For Earth Observation Science
Department of Environment and Geography
522 Wallace Building
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Canada, R3T 3N2
Phone: (204) 474-8657

Follow us on twitter - @LWBIN_UM
Web: http://lwbi.cc.umanitoba.ca/

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