enabling re-use via ckan: discoverability and interoperability

Enabling re-use

CKANOpen Knowledge FoundationIrina Bolychevsky (@shevski)

info@ckan.org

ckan.org okfn.org

We are a global movement to open up knowledge around the world and see it used and useful.

The Open Knowledge Foundation

okfn.org

We build tools and communities to educate, empower and connect people.

OpenDataProtocols.org

What's the point of open data?

The point is re-use, democratization and enabling individuals to drive:

● innovation & the economy● government transparency &

accountability

Context:● Explosion of digital information● Ever improving information technology

Open data is not a hobby it's a movement

Valuable core datasets not open

Data often buried in government web pages

Not machine readable, bad quality data

Hard to find, connect and link data

What problems are we facing?

Open Solution

Step 1: get the data openly licensed

Step 2: make it accessible - metadata, formats, portal (ckan.org)

Step 3: start building, linking and turning data into something more - information

CKAN at a glance

Metadata catalogData management platformOpen Source - everything developed on GitHubFree community and paid support availableExtensible flexible componentized architectureDeveloper friendlyRich JSON APIInteroperable

CKAN serves two main use cases

1. search and discoverability for re-users of data

2. data management tools for publishers

1. Discoverability

Search and discovery

Online home for data

Central keyword search

Facet by tags, location, format, licence...

Browse by groups, keywords, publishers

Link to datasets or data directly

Previews and data exploration

Data explorer allows filtering, editing, plotting, graphing and embedding

2. Interoperability

Harvesting and normalization

Get metadata from external catalogs and endpoints

CKAN will parse, validate and normalise to create metadata records that look the same to end users no matter where they came from

We can currently harvest: other CKAN catalogs, CSW endpoints and WAFs serving ISO 19139 documents + others

Used by governments, organizations and communities around the world

ckan.org/instances/

More generally: federation

Search across numerous different catalogs in aggregator sites (such as publicdata.eu)

Data Catalog Interoperability Protocol: http://spec.datacatalogs.org/

Spec.datacatalogs.org

Thank you

Open Knowledge FoundationIrina Bolychevsky (@shevski)

info@ckan.org

ckan.org okfn.org