CKAN

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is the world’s leading open-source software for building data management solutions. Whether your organization is big or small, public or private, CKAN enables you to create tailored systems for publishing, sharing, discovering and using data.

while true founders Adam and Paul have played pivotal roles in major CKAN projects since the software’s inception in 2014. They have both held technical leadership positions at two organizations with strong links to CKAN, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) and Datopian, during which time Paul was elected as a CKAN steward and steering group member. Adam continues to promote CKAN as a solution for transforming government data into public knowledge through The Public Knowledge Workshop (‘Hasadna’), an Israeli nonprofit of which he is co-founder.

Generally speaking, the approach taken to CKAN depends on whether an organization needs to manage private, public or restricted data use cases. Though it is not a set rule, governments tend to use CKAN to build open data portals (ie. for a public data use case), while companies and nonprofits mainly use it for internal data management purposes (ie. for private data use cases). Research institutions are a good example of a type of organization that tends to have restricted data use cases, as they often need to process personally identifiable information (PII).

CKAN is used by organizations large and small. It is the engine behind major open data portals like data.gov, data.gov.uk and data.gov.au, while also powering business intelligence workflows at startups and SMEs. It can be used to set up small-scale, ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions as well as highly-customized systems with technically-advanced features like data versioning and nuances access permission layers. In any case, CKAN’s open-source codebase means that organizations are free to extend their CKAN instances as and when they see fit, making it a sustainable, attractive choice for growing organizations.

Whatever your use case, while true will work with you to design, implement and maintain a CKAN solution that meets your needs.

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