IOOS Data Catalog: CKAN User Interface

CKAN User Interface

CKAN is a tool for making open data websites. (Think of a content management system like WordPress - but for data, instead of pages and blog posts.) It helps you manage and publish collections of data. It is used 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.

For more information about advanced uses of CKAN, please consult the CKAN User Guide.

Basic UI Layout

The basic sections of the IOOS Catalog are:

Datasets
Organizations
Feedback
About

Datasets

The datasets section is the primary interface to finding and discovering data in the catalog. The interface includes a basic text search using the search box.

The search bar works very intuitively by performing a full text search using the contents of the field. The query is sent to the solr search-engine and all matching documents are displayed in the order of most relevant.

Relevance is determined by how closely the query matches key metadata like the title and the abstract. If relevance being equal, the date-time of the dataset determines the next precedence.

Search queries for datasets can be filtered to a geographic region using the map interface on the left.

If you select the pencil icon in the upper right section of the map filter, the map will expand and the user can draw a box. This box will be used to filter out results that are not within the geographic region defined by the box the user draws.

Below the search box are the listed results. Each of the matching results determined by a text search, filtered by the map and ordered by the Order by dropdown are presented below. Only 20 items are displayed at a time. At the bottom of the results are the page numbers you can select to see more results.

Organizations

An organization in the IOOS Catalog represents an IOOS Regional Association or National Partner. Each dataset collected by CKAN belongs to an organization. This structure allows users to view, browse and find data belonging to a particular entity.

The organizations page is laid out like cards, showing a small organization logo or image, followed by a brief description and the total number of datasets in the catalog belonging to that organization.

Clicking an organization in this view takes the user to a page almost identical to the datasets page except the search results and contents are that belonging to the organization.

Along the left-hand side of the page are statistics like the number of datasets and quantity of repeating metadata tags found within the data. Clicking a tag or format will filter the datasets to only those data containing the tag or format. This is useful for finding all of the SOS data published by an organization.

Feedback

Users can select Feedback from the navigation bar next to Organizations and About. The feedback page is a simple HTML web form prompting the user for his/her name, email and the feedback comments. When a user clicks submit, an email is sent to the a list of recipients configured by the CKAN administrators. The email contains the user’s entered name, email and the feedback.

About

This section displays some basic information about the site and the technology supporting the site.

CKAN is the world’s leading open-source data portal platform.

CKAN is a complete out-of-the-box software solution that makes data accessible and usable – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data (including storage of data and provision of robust data APIs). CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organizations) wanting to make their data open and available.

CKAN is used by governments and user groups worldwide and powers a variety of official and community data portals including portals for local, national and international government, such as the UK’s data.gov.uk and the European Union’s publicdata.eu, the Brazilian dados.gov.br, Dutch and Netherland government portals, as well as city and municipal sites in the US, UK, Argentina, Finland and elsewhere.

CKAN: http://ckan.org/

CKAN Tour: http://ckan.org/tour/

Features overview: http://ckan.org/features/