The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

open data portal for the storage and distribution of open data. Being initially inspired by the

package management A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals wi ...

capabilities of Debian Linux, CKAN has developed into a powerful data catalogue system that is mainly used by public institutions seeking to share their data with the general public. CKAN's codebase is maintained by Open Knowledge Foundation. The system is used both as a public platform on Datahub and in various government data catalogues, such as the UK's

data.gov.uk data.gov.uk is a UK Government project to make available non-personal UK government data as open data. It was launched in closed beta in September 2009 and publicly launched in January 2010. As of February 2015 it contained over 19,343 datasets, r ...

, the Dutch National Data Register, the United States government's

Data.gov Data.gov is a U.S. Government website launched in late May 2009 by the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States, Vivek Kundra. Data.gov aims to improve public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by t ...

and the Australian government's "Gov 2.0". The state government of South Australia also makes government data freely available to the public on the CKAN platform. The Italian government makes available the open data of the Data & Analytics Framework on the CKAN platform.

Internal technology

CKAN's back end, the part running on the Web server, is written mainly in Python. The web pages it offers to user browsers include JavaScript. CKAN maintains information about the data sets to be offered to users in

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

databases. Searches are implemented by Solr. CKAN installations can be queried through Web APIs.

Future of the project

The Open Knowledge Foundation Board supported the CKAN Stewardship proposal jointly put forward by Link Digital and Datopian. In appointing joint stewardship to Link Digital and Datopian, the Board felt there was a clear practical path with strong leadership and committed funding to see CKAN grow and prosper in the years to come. The Open Knowledge Foundation will remain the ‘purpose trustee’ to ensure the Stewards remain true to the purpose and ethos of the CKAN project.

Similar projects and alternatives

Dataverse The Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit via a data citation w ...

provides similar functions and is widely used for open data. * DKAN is a

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

-based open data portal based on CKAN.

References

External links

*
Open Knowledge Foundation

South Australian Government Data Directory

Open data Archive networks Software using the GNU AGPL license {{web-software-stub