Data Central

This is a lightweight platform to easily distribute public data.

It uses Open Knowledge's excellent Data Packages specification as a common format to provide datasets. See the Frictionless Data vision document to understand why it's crucial to think about dataset packaging and distribution.

The main design principle when coming up with Data Central was portability and simplicity of deployment. It is a framework-less approach, using Python scripts to gather and compile all datasets, creating a static HTML web site. Static sites might not be terribly sexy, but they're extremely useful for some purposes:

• data workshops
• offline work
• easy deployment
• portability and replication

We informally refer to this project as "the poor man's CKAN".

Data Central even exposes a static JSON 'API', so that developers have an easy access to the available datasets and their metadata on the portal.

Installation and Usage

Note: This was tested on Python 2.7, and some tweaks are still needed to support Python 3 (we could use some help!)

1. Install dependencies. After cloning the repository, change to the project directory and run make install. This will create a local virtualenv and install the necessary dependencies; it shouldn't be necessary to create a virtualenv since the make commands are all set to work with the venv that make install creates inside the Data Central dir.

2. Edit settings. Copy the settings.conf.sample file into settings.conf, and edit it to set your options and point to your data package repositories.

3. Generate the HTML output. Just run make html!

4. Run a web server to see the output. Now run make serve to run a simple webserver, and open the site by pointing your browser to localhost:8002.

TODO

• Set up a generic base theme for the HTML output
• Use Hyde for a more solid static generator back-end