We’ve been working hard to set up instances of CKAN for open government data – most notably in data.gov.uk but also for open government data in Germany, France, Canada and elsewhere.
We are currently soliciting for feedback on how we can improve CKAN’s user interface and for suggestions for new features. We’re also in touch with other working on other open source platforms for open government data such as Peter Kranz’s opengov.se, the Open New Zealand Catalogue and the Sunlight Foundation’s new National Data Catalogue. The longer term vision is to have data catalogues that are interoperable, and to allow federated searching, sorting and querying of datasets. With CKAN we are also working on things like supporting semantic web technologies, machine automated manipulation of datasets via a command line interface, how to federate between different instance, and internationalisation (i18n).
This Thursday we are having a virtual session to discuss all these things and more! If you are interested in making a data catalogue in your country: whether for open government data, open data in science or otherwise, we’d love to hear from you! Details are as follows:
- When: Thursday 11th February 2010, 15-1800 GMT (16-1900 CET)
- Where: Skype + Etherpad + IRC backchannel (connect at #okfn on irc.oftc.net or via web browser)
- Participate: If you’d like to join, please drop us a line on the ckan-discuss list
For some background information and a list of existing catalogues, see the following post.
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.
Hi, sounds like an interesting meeting – not sure if I’ll be able to make it though.
Maybe I can drop in a couple of my CKAN wishlist items here:
Well I hope that’s helpful – sorry if it’s a bit of a long list.
Sean
I am very interested in making an open data catalogue and the meeting today as you can see from http://semanticommunity.net/. I registered. Thanks, Brand