Three months long internship at Open Knowledge Nepal to build Open Data Nepal portal using CKAN for the partial fulfillment of Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Information Technology .
2. Organization Overview
● Open Knowledge Nepal is as a non-profit civic tech organization comprised of openness
aficionados.
● Local chapter of Open Knowledge International since February 2013.
● The organization has been involved in research, advocacy, training, workshops and developing
tools related to open knowledge.
● Provide data services and solutions and specialized in solving data related problems.
3. Problem Statement
● Demand side of the data is increasing but lack of a central data catalog makes the task of searching
and using data more difficult.
● Data are not readily available and are in non-machine-readable formats like PDFs, images etc.
● Government data scattered into the websites of different public agencies.
● Licensing condition are not included in data.
● Data are not permanently available.
4. Objectives
● To make available all the data perpetually in a single centralized hub.
● To generate interactive visualizations of the datasets for insight and embedding.
● To provide data and information in structured, usable and machine readable formats like CSV,
JSON, XML, TSV.
● To provide Data APIs to allow for more sophisticated online querying and interaction with
datasets
● To provide metadata, meta-description and data dictionary along with each dataset for better
understanding.
● To provide a rich search experience which allows for quick ‘Google-style’ keyword search as
well as faceting by tags, categories, licensing and browsing between related datasets.
5. Technology Used
● CKAN
● Github
● PostgreSQL
● Filezilla
● Azure
● Google Sheets
● Slack
● Apache and Nginx
7. Responsibility
● Configure CKAN in Local Server and Azure Cloud Server.
● Managing CKAN Plugins.
● Deploying change sets from Local Server to Production Server.
● Configure Apache and Nginx in Azure.
8. Task process
● PM assigns the tasks through Spreadsheet with the description and deadline.
● Research and start working on the given task.
● Database design and mockup are made ready when requirements are made clear.
● After the assigned task is completed, notify the PM about the task completion.
● PM goes through the completed task and decides to approve or disapprove the task.
● If the task gets approved, new task is assigned. If the task is not approved, the PM puts the reason
behind it and asks to re-work on the task.
● New features pushed to the deployed site.
10. Discussion & Recommendation
● The beta version of Open Data Portal is currently live on website: www.opendatanepal.com.
● Since the project was majorly based on data, the system should not make any mistakes while
processing datasets, creating visualizations and managing API.
● The main problem I faced was during the configuration of CKAN in Azure as there arises many
bugs and we have to fix them one by one.
11. Conclusion
● Completed the three months long internship at Open Knowledge Nepal as a Developer and was
involved in the development of a project named Open Data Nepal.
● This project in turn has boosted my confidence in handling any of the projects that include these
technologies.
● Azure helps me understand cloud computing better.
● All in all, it was a great internship experience as it has helped me to understand how a complete
portal is developed.
● It has expanded my horizon of knowledge on solving problems and approaching projects with the
consideration of time and effort.
12. References
Data.gov. (n.d.). Retrieved February 15, 2018, from http://www.data.gov/
Iran Open Data (n.d.). Retrieved February 15, 2018, from http://iranopendata.org/fa/
Open Budgets India. (n.d.). Retrieved February 15, 2018, from http://www.openbudgetsindia.org/