CKAN is an open-source software developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation for managing and discovering open data. It provides tools for data management and user-friendly features for searching and visualizing datasets, supporting various formats and multilingual content. The platform aims to improve governance and data utilization through accessible, openly licensed information across the globe.

1. CKAN: the open source
software powering open
data portals
Open Knowledge Foundation
Irina Bolychevsky (@shevski)
info@ckan.org
ckan.org
okfn.org

2. Agenda
1. Open Knowledge Foundation
2. Context
3. CKAN overview
4. Discoverability and Data Management
5. Geospatial, Federation, Multilingualism
6. Roadmap
7. Questions

3. The Open Knowledge Foundation
We are a global movement to open up
knowledge around the world and see it used
and useful.
okfn.org

4. We build tools and communities to educate,
empower and connect people.
OpenDataProtocols.org

5. What does open mean?
A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to
use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most,
to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.
http://opendefinition.org/

6. WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org

7. DataJounalismHandbook.org

8. Working Groups
okfn.org/wg

9. What problems are we trying to solve?
To utilize digital information more effectively to improve
governance, the economy and research
Context:
● Explosion of digital information
● Ever improving information technology
For example:
● Find a better way to get to work
● Build more sustainable cities
● Spend government money more effectively and
legitimately

10. Open Solution
Step 1: get the data openly licensed
Step 2: make it accessible - metadata,
formats, portal (ckan.org)
Step 3: start building, linking and turning data
into something more - information

11. CKAN - Quick Fact Sheet
Open Source - all code on GitHub
Extensible flexible componentized architecture
Developer friendly
Rich RESTful JSON API

12. Serves two main use cases
1. search and discoverability for re-users of
data
2. data management tools for publishers

13. 1. Search and discovery
Online home for data
Central keyword search
Facet by tags, location, format, licence,
publishing department
Browse by groups, keywords, publishers
Standardized interface for viewing
Link to datasets or data directly
Previews and data exploration where possible

17. Numerous social and community features

18. Visualisation & data explorer functionality:
● Previews for many types of data
● Data API for .csv & tabular data
● Linkable URIs and ability to embed visualisations

19. Data explorer allows filtering, editing, plotting,
graphing and embedding

20. Data Management for Publishers
Easily store and update metadata records
Workflow and approval
Fine grained authorization controls
Broken link reports
Download and view counts

22. Add and edit dataset metadata

23. Authorisation & access control

25. Stats & analytics
CKAN comes with inbuilt stats + integration with
Google Analytics
Includes dataset counts, download counts +
reports

26. Link checker and 5 star ratings

27. Specialist Features

28. Sophisticated geospatial capabilities

29. Geo-Search: Filter by location /
draw bounding box
WMS previews
Plotting GeoJSON / Longitude &
Latitude in tabular data
Support for:
● INSPIRE
● GEMINI 2.1
● CSW
● ISO 19139

30. Harvesting and normalization
Get metadata from external catalogs and
endpoints
CKAN will parse, validate and normalise to
create metadata records that look the same to
end users no matter where they came from
We can currently harvest: other CKAN
catalogs, CSW endpoints and WAFs serving
ISO 19139 documents

33. Federation
Search across catalogs in aggregator sites
(such as publicdata.eu)
Data Catalog Interoperability Protocol: http:
//spec.datacatalogs.org/

34. Spec.datacatalogs.org

35. Multilingualism
Translated by into over 18 languages
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/ckan/language/sv/
Fully supports all international characters
Added multilingual search, setting dataset
language level, string translations using a
vocabulary & more for the European
Commission Open Data Portal

36. Roadmap
Extending data exploration features
Supporting complex workflows
Better reports, analytics and notifications

37. Open Source
All our code is on Github: https://github.
com/okfn/ckan
Open issue tracker
Code contributions: https://github.
com/okfn/ckan/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.
rst

39. Used by governments,
organizations and communities
around the world

44. ckan.org/instances/

45. Thank you.
Questions?
Open Knowledge Foundation
Irina Bolychevsky (@shevski)
info@ckan.org
ckan.org
okfn.org