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Data catalog platform for data discovery, governance, and lineage
Open-Source Projects
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Powerful platform for publishing, sharing, and managing open data
CKAN enables organizations to create data portals, catalog datasets, provide APIs, and visualize data, supporting robust data discovery and reuse across governments and NGOs.
CKAN is a mature data‑management system used by governments, NGOs, and research institutions to build public data portals. It provides a searchable catalog, dataset versioning, and a user‑friendly web interface that makes data discovery straightforward for both technical and non‑technical audiences.
The platform ships with a rich front‑end, a complete RESTful API for both metadata and raw resources, and built‑in visualization widgets. Its plugin architecture lets developers add custom authentication, storage back‑ends, or domain‑specific extensions. Documentation covers installation, configuration, and scaling, and the community offers support via mailing lists, Gitter, and Stack Overflow.
CKAN runs on Python and PostgreSQL and can be deployed on‑premise or in containers. Detailed installation guides are available in the official docs, and continuous‑integration pipelines ensure code quality. Organizations can start with a basic instance and extend it over time to meet evolving data‑governance needs.
When teams consider CKAN, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
National open data portal
Provides a centralized catalog, public API, and searchable interface for all government datasets, improving transparency and citizen engagement.
Humanitarian crisis data hub
Enables rapid ingestion and sharing of emergency datasets, allowing responders to discover, download, and visualize critical information in real time.
Academic research data repository
Offers versioned storage, metadata standards compliance, and API access, facilitating reproducible research and cross‑institutional data discovery.
City services dashboard
Feeds municipal applications with up‑to‑date datasets via the API and visual widgets, supporting data‑driven decision making for urban planners.
CKAN is written primarily in Python and uses PostgreSQL for data storage.
Installation instructions are provided in the official documentation and cover manual setup, Docker deployment, and configuration of required services.
Yes, CKAN includes built‑in user management and can be extended with plugins for SSO, LDAP, or OAuth integration.
CKAN’s plugin architecture allows developers to add new storage back‑ends, visualizations, authentication methods, and other domain‑specific features.
CKAN is released under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.
Project at a glance
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