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!
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.
