The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on EU Open Data.

At the government data project at the University of Bergen, we see the Norwegian language version of CKAN, launched this week, as a significant step on the way to opening up data sources for reuse in Norway. With CKAN, we have one more piece of crucial infrastructure in place:

• http://no.ckan.net/
• http://no.ckan.net/package/list

Thanks to help from the fast and efficient CKAN community, the translation could be implemented in a short time. In addition, data packages that we had already registered as part of our project could be imported from a Google spreadsheet. With 136 packages already online at no.ckan.net, we feel we have had a good start.

We of course hope that the Norwegian open data community – both inside and outside government agencies – now will seize the opportunity and engage in registering data sources at no.ckan.net. In addition, we believe that the existence of the website will alert more people to the need for a proper “store” of government data. In fact, the Norwegian minister responsible for IT policy recently stated that work on a Norwegian “data.gov” had begun.

In the context of the international open data community, we certainly aim to share experiences made with no.ckan.net as we move forward.

Related posts:

1. CKAN 0.7 Released Just in time for our upcoming workshops a new version of CKAN (v0.7) is ready. It provides some major improvements including: Convert to use SQLAlchemy and vdm v0.3 (v. major) Atom/RSS feed for Recent Changes Package search via name and...
2. Over 200 Packages on CKAN! 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...
3. CKAN 0.8 Released A new release of CKAN is now out together with a new, and substantially improved versioned domain model library. Changes include: View information about package history (ticket:53) Basic datapkg integration (ticket:57) Show information about package openness using icons (ticket:56) One-stage...