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CKAN extensions Archiver and QA upgraded
David Read - January 27, 2016 in Data Quality, Extensions
Popular CKAN extensions 'Archiver' and 'QA' have recently been significantly upgraded. Now it is relatively simple to add automatic broken link checking and 5 stars of openness grading to any CKAN site. At a time when many open data portals suffer from quality problems, adding these reports make it easy to identify the problems and get credit when they are resolved. Whilst these extensions have been around for a few years, most of the development has been on forks, whilst the core has been languishing. In the past couple of months there has been a big push to merge all the efforts from US (data.gov), Finland, Greece, Slovakia and Netherlands, and particularly those from UK (data.gov.uk), into core. It's been a big leap forward in functionality. Now installers no longer need to customize templates – you get details of broken links and 5 stars shown on every dataset simply by installing and configuring the extensions. And now we're all on the same page, it means we can work together better from now on. The Archiver Extension regularly tries out all datasets' data links to see if they are still working. File URLs that do work are downloaded and the user is offered the 'cached' copy. Otherwise, URLs that are broken are marked in red and listed in a report. See more: ckanext-archiver repo, docs and demo images The QA Extension analyses the data files that Archiver has downloaded to reliably determine their format – CSV, XLS, PDF, etc, rather than trusting the format that the publisher has said they are. This information is combined with the data license and whether the data is currently accessible to give a rating out of 5 according to Tim Berners-Lee's 5 Stars of Openness. A file that has no open licence, or is not available gets 0 stars. If it passes those tests but is only a PDF then it gets 1 star. A machine-readable but proprietry format like XLS gets it 2 stars, and an open format like CSV gets it 3 stars. 4 and 5 star data is that which uses standard schemas and references other datasets, which tends to mean RDF. See ckanext-qa repo, docs and demo images
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David Read - January 27, 2016 in Uncategorized
CKAN 2.5 released, patch versions for 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x and 2.4.x available
David Read - December 17, 2015 in Releases
We are happy to announce that CKAN 2.5 is now released. In addition, new patch releases for older versions of CKAN are now available to download and install. CKAN 2.5 The 2.5 release (actually 2.5.1 as we skipped 2.5.0) offers speed improvements to the home page, searching and several other key pages and API. In addition, CKAN extensions can provide language translations in a more integrated way. And it's now easy to customize the file uploader to suit using different cloud providers. 2.5 also includes plenty of other improvements contributed by the CKAN developer community during the past 4 months, as detailed in the CHANGELOG. If you have customizations or extensions, we suggest you trial the upgrade first in a test environment and refer to the changes in the changelog. Upgrade instructions are below. CKAN patch releases These new patch releases for CKAN 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x and 2.4.x fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using. For a list of the fixes included you can check the CHANGELOG. Upgrading For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method:
Source upgrade
If you find any issue, you can let the technical team know in the mailing list or the IRC channel.
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David Read - December 17, 2015 in Uncategorized
CKAN 2.4 release and patch releases
David Read - July 22, 2015 in Releases
We are happy to announce that CKAN 2.4 is now released. In addition, new patch releases for older versions of CKAN are now available to download and install. CKAN 2.4 The 2.4 release brings a way to set the CKAN config via environment variables and via the API, which is useful for automated deployment setups. 2.4 also includes plenty of other improvements contributed by the CKAN developer community during the past 4 months, as detailed in the 2.4.0 CHANGELOG If you have customizations or extensions, we suggest you trial the upgrade first in a test environment and refer to the changes in the changelog. Upgrade instructions are below. CKAN patch releases These new patch releases for CKAN 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x and 2.3.x fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using. For a list of the fixes included you can check the CHANGELOG:
Upgrading For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method:
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