Data.gov.uk releases Open Source code

Posted on 20/08/2010 17 comments 1 Attachment

As part of the government’s ongoing work around transparency, today we are releasing some of the custom software code we've developed – a CKAN module for Drupal. This is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We're excited to see how developers and colleagues across the world put this work to good use in their own applications and projects.

The code itself is attached to this blog post as a tar.gz file and contains one main package with two sub-packages within. This code release allows content to be synched from CKAN into Drupal. CKAN is the system we use as our “back end” to store information about all the data government has released. Drupal is a system to publish web content, and serves as our “front end” through which people can use to find our datasets and comment on them.

The main CKANPackage code creates a Drupal custom content type to represent data in the same way as CKAN. The first sub-package is the CKANImporter which imports packages from CKAN into Drupal and allows this to take place as a one-off batch import or as an update to the latest changes since a specified time. The second sub-package is CKANDatagovuk which correlates fields in CKAN with Drupal hooks.

The code release includes comments in the files to assist users with the functionality. You can of course contact us should you have any questions.

Please see below to download the code, which we will also be releasing on Drupal.org shortly to allow the community to comment, review and improve it.

By Data.gov.uk Team

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ckanpackage.tar.gzckanpackage.tar.gz(21.68 KB)
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Comments (17)

Moving to drupal.org?

Thu, 24/03/2011 - 16:54 — Anonymous

Anybody here? Coming from Drupal community I strongly consider to release this CKAN module in drupal.org repository, it's way easier now thanks to a Git migration. If this is not possible (not GPL licence), please consider some other public repo such as Bitbucket or Github. Thanks!

Also, I would like to help

Fri, 26/11/2010 - 12:51 — Anonymous

Also, I would like to help you update this for Drupal 7. If you can upload it to CVS, it will be easy for me to write patches.

-Lin Clark

http://lin-clark.com/

http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/lin_clark/

I see that the developer has

Fri, 26/11/2010 - 12:23 — Anonymous

I see that the developer has been approved for a CVS account, it would be great to see this posted on Drupal.org. It would be interesting to consider whether the module can be integrated with Feeds so that the updates can be managed through that system rather than through Drush.

Sounds very good, are there

Sat, 02/10/2010 - 17:36 — Anonymous

Sounds very good, are there plans to integrate with Wordpress as well as Drupal?

Thanks

Peter Stevens

Great news.

Wed, 08/09/2010 - 10:09 — BenAcheson

Thanks for the file data.gov.uk. It's really exciting to see the UK government supporting open source, which by its nature is quite democratic, after all. (If only politics was more open-source).

I can't wait for the next module. Keep up the good work.

Ben Acheson

Nice!

Tue, 24/08/2010 - 00:08 — Anonymous

Do you have a plan to add the module on drupal.org? It would be great :).

rock

Wed, 02/11/2011 - 09:56 — Anonymous (not verified)

contributed to drupal.org can be found here:

A drupal module not on d.o is not a drupal module

Sun, 03/10/2010 - 18:58 — Anonymous

Please work with the community and her guidelines and ask for a cvs account and contribute the code on drupal.org

Opensource works with many eyeballs and drupal facilitates this to let all codes be hosted on d.o itself.

Please deploy and maintain the code there.

data.gov.uk code on drupal.org

Wed, 10/11/2010 - 14:26 — phil | Moderator

Hi,

More information about the code contributed to drupal.org can be found here:

http://drupal.org/node/892150

Many thanks,

Phil

crown copyright

Mon, 17/01/2011 - 10:40 — Anonymous

The project is at the moment not on Drupal.org because of the included Crown copyright. See http://drupal.org/node/892150#comment-3581694

Is it possible for the UK government to release this module without the Crown copyright to the open source Drupal community?

second

Tue, 15/03/2011 - 09:08 — Anonymous

i fully support that request

module is published

Thu, 21/07/2011 - 19:04 — Anonymous

Module is now published on drupal.org http://www.drupal.org/project/ckan

Rationale

Sun, 22/08/2010 - 10:01 — Anonymous

What made you decide on importing the CKAN-data into Drupal rather than presenting it natively through the CKAN web-interface in parrallel to the Drupal site?
Does the usage inside Drupal add functionality in addition to the web-interface CKAN provides?

--
Geir Bækholt
www.jarn.com/baekholt

Rationale

Wed, 10/11/2010 - 14:35 — phil | Moderator

Hi Geir,

Sorry not to respond to your post sooner.

In order to create a joined-up user experience across the site functionality, we required a CMS to create a unified presentation layer for site.  Using this unified presentation layer allowed elements such as user comments, ratings etc. to be readily associated to CKAN data packages displayed on the site.  Drupal fulfilled a number of our selection criteria for the CMS, primarily in relation to its extensibility and the extent of it's community support.

Thanks,

Phil

I would imagine representing

Thu, 02/09/2010 - 07:59 — Anonymous

I would imagine representing CKAN data inside Drupal would offer greater flexibility on how to present the information on the website and how that data is related to non-CKAN information.

CKAN provides such a nice

Wed, 29/09/2010 - 16:05 — Anonymous

CKAN provides such a nice REST API, secure or open editing and revisioning, you can see why that's what everyone's choosing.

Huzzah!

Wed, 01/09/2010 - 15:19 — Anonymous

Perfect timing for this local Gov project :-)