What is CKAN?
CKAN is the world’s leading open-source data portal platform. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and work with data. It's a data management system that provides a powerful platform for cataloguing, storing and accessing datasets with a rich front-end, full API (for both data and catalogue), visualisation tools and more. More about
What are CKAN extensions?
CKAN allows you to pick and choose which features you want to use for your data portal. Or, you can easily develop your own by following the extending !
There are over 200 community extensions which have been published under open source licenses by contributors from all over the world. You can search through our curated list of extensions to find what you are looking for.
CKAN core extensions
Datastore: Provides an ad hoc database for storage of structured data from CKAN resources. Data can be pulled out of resource files and stored in the DataStore.
Stats: Analyzes your CKAN database and displays several tables and graphs with statistics about your site, including:
- Total number of datasets
- Dataset revisions per week
- Top-rated datasets
- Most-edited Datasets
- Largest groups
- Top tags
- Users owning most datasets
CKAN contributed extensions
Harvest: Provides a common harvesting framework for CKAN extensions and adds a CLI and a WUI to CKAN to manage harvesting sources and jobs.
Hierarchy: Organization hierarchy for CKAN. Organisations can be arranged in a tree hierarchy.
DCAT: Allow’s CKAN to expose and consume metadata from other catalogues using RDF documents serialised using DCAT. The Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is "an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogues published on the Web".
Xloader: Loads CSV (and similar) data into CKAN's DataStore. Designed as a replacement for DataPusher because it offers ten times the speed and more robustness (hence the name, derived from "Express Loader").
Archiver: Downloads all CKAN's resources, for three purposes:
offer it to the user as a 'cached' copy, in case the link becomes broken
tell the user (and publishers) if the link is broken, on both the dataset/resource and in a 'Broken Links' report
the downloaded file can be analysed by other extensions, such as ckanext-qa or ckanext-pacakgezip.
Quality Assurance: Checks each of your dataset resources in CKAN and give them an 'openness score' based Tim Berners-Lee's five stars of openness.
Scheming: Provides a way to configure and share metadata schemas using a YAML or JSON schema description. Custom validation and template snippets for editing and display are supported.
Contributed community extensions
Data requests: Allows users to ask for datasets that are not already published in the CKAN instance. This way, we can set up a Data Market, not only with data supplies but also with data demands.
Report: Provides a reporting infrastructure. Here are the features offered:
All available reports are listed on a central web page and from the command-line.
Breadcrumbs allow navigation from a report back to the reports page.
Reports are served as a web page, JSON or CSV from a cache.
The reports can be run in a nightly batch and saved to the cache.
Admins can regenerate reports from the report's web page.
Validation: Brings data validation powered by the goodtables library to CKAN. It provides out of the box features to validate tabular data and integrate validation reports to the CKAN interface.
Data validation can be performed automatically on the background or during dataset creation, and the results are stored against each resource.
Comprehensive reports are created detailing issues found with the data, both at the structure level (missing headers, blank rows, etc) and at the data schema level (wrong data types, values out of range etc).
YTP Comments: Allows users to comment on datasets. Anyone with an account can comment on any public datasets. Users with modification access can delete comments from the dataset.
Additional extensions
Customised extensions developed for clients specific business requirements
Dataset form: Adds a simple form to each dataset that sends an email to the author/maintainer of the current dataset.
Reporting: Creates UI and scheduled email reports to data owners to view their organisation’s datasets.
Workflow: This is a simple dataset workflow solution for CKAN datasets.
Google Analytics API: Sends back end API events to google analytics.