CKAN Goes Gold: Open Data for All

by Joe Brockmeier - May. 20, 2010Comments (1)

Open Knowledge Foundation Logo The Open Knowledge Foundation has put the wrapper on CKAN 1.0 after three years of development. Nicknamed the "Debian of Data," the CKAN software is behind the foundation's CKAN.net and nearly 1,000 packages of open data and content.

CKAN, short for the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, is a catalog system for knowledge (data) resources. The idea takes after open source software repositories and collections like Perl's Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), or the Debian repositories. The idea is to make it as easy to exchange open data as it is to install open source software, and allow organizations to put up their own data catalogs. CKAN only powers a handful of sites at the moment, but with the 1.0 release will hopefully see a bit more traction.

CKAN is written in Python and provides a Web interface for adding and managing content, an API to allow anyone to create CKAN clients, and full searchability. It also features fine-grained user access controls, and can import data via Excel spreadsheets. Eventually CKAN will also support relationships between packages, so users will be able to build on other data packages and associate them with the existing packages as a dependency.

The best way to understand what CKAN is all about is to browse the package list and see what's been contributed so far. You'll find everything from links to Alt Law to CERN Bibliographic Data. It's a hodge-podge, but there's something for almost everyone.

Open data has not caught on quite so well as open source, but it'd be nice if CKAN can help with that. Making it easy to exchange open data, and helping to standardize the practice, is one of the first steps.