= Welcome to Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) Development Project Wiki =

== CKAN Service, CKAN API ==

The CKAN software is used to run the CKAN service: http://www.ckan.net/

The CKAN service also provides a [http://www.ckan.net/api/rest RESTful interface] for machine clients.

CKAN is an [http://www.okfn.org/ Open Knowledge Foundation] project.

Major features:
  * Domain Model: Data and content "packages" with a standard set of core metadata and support for adding unlimited ''arbitrary'' additional metadata
    * All package data is automatically versioned in a wiki-like manner
    * Tagging of packages
    * Groups for controlled categorization of packages
    * Ratings
    * Unlimited associated package resources ('download urls') with additional metadata (format, description etc) 
  * Complete web user interface (WUI)
    * Package adding, editing, listing etc
    * Wiki features such as "Recent Changes", edit histories, purging of changes etc
    * User management and user home pages
  * API: full JSON-based API (with python client)
    * RDF version also available
    * CKAN is easy to use as your "catalogue" backend
  * Search: Full searchability (including full-text support) via API and WUI
  * Access control: fine-grained access control for packages and groups
  * Open-source and python implemented
  * Associated command line client (datapkg)

Coming soon:
  * Package relationships (depends on, derived from ...)
  * Detailed statistics (+ tag clouds etc)
  * See the tickets for more ...

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== Development Project Home Page ==

Code is in a mercurial repository here: http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/hg

This Trac service is being used to track CKAN project developments.

Documentation can be found at: http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/doc/ckan/ (and on this wiki).
                              [http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/doc/datapkg/ DataPkg Documentation]

== The Design Vision ==

[[Image(ckan-vision.png)]]

== Related Work ==

  * Debian / R
  * [http://www.ivoa.net/ Virtual Observatory]
  * PyPI / Gems / CPAN

== Purpose ==

For those from the open source community it can most simply be put as:

'''Freshmeat for Knowledge / A Debian for Data'''

More detailed:

'''A registry of open knowledge resources supporting automated reuse'''

== Design pages ==

 * PackageResources
 * DataPkgUseCases
 * UiReviewNotes