CKAN (The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network)*

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data. It powers datahub.io, catalog.data.gov and europeandataportal.eu/data/en/dataset among many other sites. http://ckan.org/

Once your data is published, users can use its faceted search features to browse and find the data they need, and preview it using maps, graphs and tables – whether they are developers, journalists, researchers, NGOs, citizens, or even your own staff.

CKAN provides a streamlined way to make your data discoverable and presentable. Each dataset is given its own page for the listing of data resources and a rich collection of metadata, making it a valuable and easily searchable data catalogue.

Technology

CKAN is built with Python on the backend and Javascript on the frontend, and uses The Pylons web framework and SQLAlchemy as its ORM (Object-relational mapping). Its database engine is PostgreSQL and its search is powered by SOLR. It has a modular architecture that allows extensions to be developed to provide additional features such as harvesting or data upload.

CKAN uses its internal model to store metadata about the different records, and presents it on a web interface that allows users to browse and search this metadata. It also offers a powerful API that allows third-party applications and services to be built around it.

CKAN is open source software, with an active community of contributors  who develop and maintain its core technology. CKAN is modified and extended by an even larger community of developers who contribute to a growing library of CKAN extensions.

CKAN Features

The core functionality of CKAN provides a wealth of features and has over 200 community extensions which can fill almost any feature gap.

[*Source: https://ckan.org/]

Thinking of what is functional, efficient and effective for our HEF members, we set up a list of criteria:

• Intuitive usage
• User friendly for members/editors and visitors
• Interactive searching and browsing
• Advanced filtering functionality (incl. spatial and temporal search)
• Access control (on different levels)
• Support different resource types and formats
• Be able to manage multiple organisation and groups
• Be extendable and adaptable based on the requirements
• Vendor neutral

Studying and examining several solutions in the market we decided to choose CKAN. CKAN meets all the above listed criteria.

• It is an open Source, free software. This means that one can use it without any license fees.
• All rights to the registered data and metadata are obtained by the operator of the CKAN instance.
• It can be extended and adapted according to the different scenarios and use cases for HEF.
• The flexibility in extending the metadata schema as well as the harvesting functionalities which pull data from other data portals.
• It is a mature data portal software which is in use by many governments, organisations and communities around the world* (e.g Berlin open data, US data gov, etc.)
• It provides an enhanced discovery of resources such as spatial queries (ckan extension).
• It offers the management of data according to thematic categories and owner organisations.
• In CKAN in addition to the diverse resources, organisations can be defined and managed.

[* List of CKAN instances can be found here: https://ckan.org/about/instances/]

Download and Install*

Source Code

The CKAN source code is available from this public repository in github: https://github.com/ckan/ckan.

Installing CKAN

Before you can use CKAN on your own computer, you need to install it. There are three ways to install CKAN:

1. Install from an operating system package
2. Install from source
3. Install from Docker Compose

From package is the quickest and easiest way to install CKAN, but it requires Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit or Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit.

You should install CKAN from package if

• You want to install CKAN on an Ubuntu 16.04 or 14.04, 64-bit server, and
• You only want to run one CKAN website per server

See Installing CKAN from package.

You should install CKAN from source if:

• You want to install CKAN on a 32-bit computer, or
• You want to install CKAN on a different version of Ubuntu, not 16.04 or 14.04, or
• You want to install CKAN on another operating system (eg. RedHat, CentOS, OS X), or
• You want to run multiple CKAN websites on the same server, or
• You want to install CKAN for development

See Installing CKAN from source.

The provided Docker Compose configuration provides a clean and quick way to deploy a vanilla CKAN without extensions, while still allowing the addition (and customization) of extensions. This option comes with the caveat that some further steps need to be taken to deploy a production-ready CKAN.

You should install CKAN from Docker Compose if:

• You want to install CKAN with less effort than a source install and more flexibility than a package install, or
• You want to run or even develop extensions with the minimum setup effort, or
• You want to see whether and how CKAN, Docker and your respective infrastructure will fit together.

See Installing CKAN with Docker Compose.

If you’ve already setup a CKAN website and want to upgrade it to a newer version of CKAN, see Upgrading CKAN.

[*Source: https://ckan.org/download-and-install/]