We’ve recently been working hard to improve CKAN. Now you can try out some of the new features…

  • Groups – While CKAN already allows packages to be categorized with tags, which anyone can edit, now you can create curated groups of packages. Group administrators control who can edit the packages associated with a given group.
CKAN Groups Detail
  • Ratings – Each package can be given a general star rating by anyone. It should become a useful indicator of usefulness. There are controls to stop people voting more than once.
CKAN Ratings Detail
  • Integration with Is It Open? (Alpha) – You can now click straight through from CKAN to the alpha Is It Open? service – to request information about the whether or not a given package is open.
Is It Open? detail
  • Your user page – this already covers recent edits and now shows
    total edits and packages you are admin for. We intend it to be more
    customisable and publicly linked to.

We’d love to hear what you think of these changes – and any ideas about how we can make CKAN better!

Screenshot showing updates to 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.