This post was written by Pieter Colpaert, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Belgium Chapter.
The DataTank is open source software, just like CKAN, Drupal or Elastic Search, which you can use to transform a dataset into an HTTP API. Today (the 5th of December 2014), we are proud to launch the 4.0 version on which professional support will be provided. The project was started in 2008 by one of the founders of Open Knowledge Foundation Belgium. Today it remains mainly developed by OKFN Belgium, but we are welcoming new contributors from all over the world.
To get an idea of what The DataTank can do, check http://thedatatank.com or our demo server: http://demo.thedatatank.com.
With this new version of The DataTank, we hope that hackathon developers will have a tool to set up an API for their developers in no time, that start-ups will be able to combine different Open Datasets from all over the world in one Web service without trouble, that Open Data Portal developers are going to integrate The DataTank with CKAN, and that data owners are going to see a faster return on investment from publishing their data.
The platform is written in PHP using the Laravel framework. If this is a language you speak, feel free to dig in and fork us on github: http://github.com/tdt/core
Oh, did we mention it also publishes RDF where suitable? http://demo.thedatatank.com/api/dcat
If you want to use The DataTank at your organisation but you’re not a technical person, we can help you! Contact our team at info@thedatatank.com
This post is by a guest poster. If you would like to write something for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, please see the submissions page.
