open.canada.ca

Ian Ward · June 18, 2013

data.gc.ca

A site I’ve been working on for the past few months has just launched. data.gc.ca “2.0” (update: now open.canada.ca) is a completely rewritten version of the Open Data portal for the Government of Canada.

I worked on the CKAN portion of the site responsible for the data catalogue. CKAN is an open source Data Portal application written in Python. I built a fully bilingual schema with many additional fields for our datasets. I also optimized, fixed and improved many parts of CKAN itself.

Our team built templates based on the Web Experience Toolkit (WET). WET provides building blocks for creating accessible, mobile-friendly web sites. These templates include a map widget for our geospatial datasets and an interactive data table for previews of tabular data.

All of our work is available on the open-data github page and is released under a permissive license.

data.gc.ca might just be the largest, most fully bilingual and most accessible CKAN site anywhere. More to come!