Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN)

CKAN is an Open Source platform for making catalogs of open data, such as spredsheets, geospatial GeoJSON data, OData, etc.
CKAN is inspired by the package management systems as in Linux OS. CKAN codebase is maintained by Open Knowledge Foundation.
It is widely used and adopted by national and local governments, research institutions, and other organizations who collect a lot of data. Once your data is published, users can use its faceted search features to browse and find the data they need,and preview it using maps, graphs and tables – whether they are developers, journalists, researchers, NGOs, citizens, or even your own staff.
CKAN supports multi-tenant data structure model, allowing different organizations to publish and manage their proprietary datasets.
The CKAN platform provides both Web-based GUI and the REST APIs to automate the procedures of data provisioning and publications.
The role of CKAN in the platform is to provide a cataogoue of data for the community of the platform users. CKAN has become a reference model for the managment and exposure of the Open Data due to
  • possibility to customize both the functionality and the catalogue through the extensions and UI themes
  • support for various different formats and plugins for the management and representation
  • rich and extensible model of the metadata, which allows for the integration of the specific models and reference ontologies.
  • large community support and adoption.

The integration of CKAN within the platform is based on

  • the APIs provided by the CKAN distribution out of the box (e.g., APIs for the user management and access control, publication and management of data sets).
  • the extensions for the 3rd party authentication plugins.
It is important to note, however, that the integration of CKAN within the platform is optional.
It is possible to rely on the Open Data portals already available in the specific contexts (e.g., existing portals provided by the PAs).

The official CKAN documentation is available here : https://ckan.org/documentation-and-api/