wiki:WikiStart

Version 22 (modified by rgrp, 4 years ago) (diff)

describe ckan and mention excel importer

Welcome to Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) Project Wiki

CKAN is a registry or catalogue system for datasets or other "knowledge" resources. CKAN aims to make it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data, especially in ways that are machine automatable.

Those familiar with software services like freshmeat, CPAN, or apt can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for content and data.

The CKAN software is used to run the CKAN service: ​http://www.ckan.net/ and is also running the catalogue behind ​http://data.gov.uk/. CKAN is an ​Open Knowledge Foundation project.

Features

Major features:

  • Free/Open?-Source software, written in Python
  • 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)
  • 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 group
  • Additional interfaces:
    • Excel importer (upload dataset/package information direct from a spreadsheet)
    • Fully featured command line client (datapkg)

Coming soon:

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

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).

​DataPkg Documentation

The Design Vision

No image "ckan-vision.png" attached to WikiStart

Related Work

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