News from the CKAN team 3 May 2012

Here is the latest update on activity from the CKAN team.

Forthcoming release

Most of the developers' time recently has gone into preparing the major release of version 1.7 due on Friday. Adrià is managing the release process, and all is going smoothly for release on schedule.

New faces

• Aron Carroll has joined the team as a front-end developer. The thrust of CKAN development has often tended to be on the stuff under the bonnet, so it's great to have someone who will be focussing on the user interface.

• Darwin Peltan has joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as a project manager, and one of his areas of responsibility will be CKAN's involvement in the LOD2 project. Welcome to both our newcomers!

Instances

• Work continues on the EC Portal project. David has been in discussions about how file storage will be handled, and written some documentation, and John has done some customising of the metadata fields.

• The Datahub has been upgraded to the forthcoming version 1.7 of CKAN. Get a sneak preview there.

• semantic.ckan.net is being brought back to life and will be running again very shortly. It's a Linked Data interface to thedatahub.org, providing datset information in RDF format via SPARQL, Linked Data's equivalent of SQL. The old version was built using the triplestore (RDF database) 4store, but broke mysteriously about two weeks ago. The running of the site has now been kindly taken on by OpenLink, another LOD2 partner, using their Virtuoso triplestore. Apologies to users who have tried to use it in the meantime.

CKAN features

• Sean has been finishing off support for a 'follow' button, for keeping informed of changes to a dataset.

• Adrià has fixed some bugs in the data viewer's new map view.

• A chosen view from the data viewer can now be embedded as an image on an external webpage, thanks to some nifty work by Ian.

• John has added a field to resources to record their creation date.

• Ross has started work on a 'simple theming' feature, which will provide the administrator of a CKAN site with a web interface to change some style elements, such as colours and headers, as well as the text of the 'about' page.

Events

• Mark and Ira went to the first Open Data Cities Conference in Brighton. It's clear from the number of people there that cities have really woken up to the possibilities in Open Data.