Date:
23 October 2020
Author:
Mark Calvert

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 CKANExternal Link

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 guideExternal Link !

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.

Go to Datastore extensionExternal Link

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

Go to Stats extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Harvest extensionExternal Link

Hierarchy: Organization hierarchy for CKAN. Organisations can be arranged in a tree hierarchy.

Go to Hierarchy extensionExternal Link

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".

Go to DCAT extensionExternal Link

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").

Go to Xloader extensionExternal Link

Archiver: Downloads all CKAN's resources, for three purposes:

  1. offer it to the user as a 'cached' copy, in case the link becomes broken

  2. tell the user (and publishers) if the link is broken, on both the dataset/resource and in a 'Broken Links' report

  3. the downloaded file can be analysed by other extensions, such as ckanext-qa or ckanext-pacakgezip.

Go to Archiver extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Quality Assurance extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Scheming extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Data requests extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Report extensionExternal Link

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).

Go to Validation extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to YTP comments extensionExternal Link

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.

Go to Dataset form extensionExternal Link

Reporting: Creates UI and scheduled email reports to data owners to view their organisation’s datasets.

Go to Reporting extensionExternal Link

Workflow: This is a simple dataset workflow solution for CKAN datasets.

Go to Workflow resource extensionExternal Link

Google Analytics API: Sends back end API events to google analytics.

Go to Google Analytics API extensionExternal Link

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