Today the number of packages in the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) has passed the 200 mark! CKAN is an open registry of (open) knowledge packages – from genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics.

CKAN currently includes basic metadata about each package – including title, URL, download URL, tags, license information and notes. Packages include everything from a large collection of choral music to data for carbon footprinting.

CKAN is being developed to serve the community of people who create, re-use and re-distribute open resources. If you have any suggestions for new features, or you would like to help out with any aspect of its development – please get in touch! You can find out more about forthcoming technical work at its trac page.

We will soon be organising another CKAN Package Party – to accelerate the registration of packages into CKAN. We also want to get more comprehensive coverage of open material in different domains – whether geodata, socioeconomic data, scientific data or literary corpora – and will be working more closely with researchers and developers to curate parts of the registry.

If you come across a big dataset or a large collection of content, we hope you consider registering it on CKAN!

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.