Last month, we announced the launch of a new CKAN feature developed by Datopian that allows users to subscribe to datasets. This is an opt-in feature that sends users an email notification when a data...

Subscribe to Datasets: New CKAN Feature Explained

July 16, 2020 by Annabel van DaalenDatopian are proud to announce a new partnership with publicplan GmbH, a German IT company specialising in open-source software solutions and IT consulting for publi...

Datopian partner with publicplan GmbH to boost CKAN adoption in Germany

Open Knowledge International and Viderum are delighted to announce that Rufus Pollock is joining Viderum as President and CEO. Rufus is a pioneer and leader in the open data community, founder of Open...

Announcing Rufus Pollock is Joining Viderum

Are you keen on building rich and interactive data portals? Do you find value in the power and flexibility of JavaScript, Nextjs, and React? In that case, allow us to introduce you to PortalJS, a stat...

Enhancing Geospatial Data Visualization with PortalJS

This article is a summary of an interview between Rufus Pollock and Richard Pietro for the podcast series Stories from the Open Gov. Rufus tells the story of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s journey, f...

Podcast: Open Knowledge Foundation founder (and Datopian President!) Rufus Pollock shares the the organisation's backstory

In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of Rufus’ insights during the closing debate of the first digital edition of the EU’s annual semantic interoperability conference (SEMIC). Alongside fellow p...

“Is it a bird, is it a plane?” Here’s what Datopian founder & CTO, Rufus Pollock, had to say about data quality at SEMIC 2020

Effective today, we are renaming Viderum to Datopian. All viderum.com related services (including email) will continue to work as normal, and we will roll out the rebrand across all our web properties...

Viderum is renaming to Datopian

We are releasing a new service where people can get notified when datasets change.

We believe we can build better products through collaboration. Following past examples, we are now open-sourcing a n...

Release: Subscribe to CKAN datasets

Today, we're celebrating Rufus Pollock, a visionary whose work has transformed the landscape of open data, open knowledge, and beyond. On his birthday, we honor his significant contributions and refle...

Honoring Rufus Pollock: Innovator and Leader on His Birthday

Great news! European Commission has adopted the proposal of the Interoperable Europe Act!The term 'interoperability,' may sound a bit complicated, but it is really all about being able to work togethe...

Great news: European Commission has adopted the proposal of the Interoperable Europe Act!

A revolutionary new online portal, which gives open access to Denmark’s energy data, is set to spark innovation in smart, data-led solutions for energy efficiency. The Energy Data Service, being launc...

New open energy data portal set to spark innovation in energy efficiency solutions

December 13, 2019 by Paul Walsh

Next year marks the 10th anniversary of Open Data Day! Open Data Day is the annual event where we gather to reach out to new people and build new solutions to issues i...

Getting ready for Open Data Day 2020 on Saturday 7th March

Most data products still assume users will come to them: open a BI tool, find the right dashboard, adjust filters, then interpret results. That works for scheduled reporting, but it breaks down when t...

Why We’re Building Agentic Data Portals (Not Just More Dashboards)

Once upon a time, more and more organizations (enterprises, governments, NGOs) had more and more data from more and more sources (internal and external).They knew/felt that it must be valuable if only...

Once Upon a Time in Data Land

Today we're kicking off a 3-week training program with participants from the Gulf Region. The training program is designed for government agencies that would like to immerse themselves in the world of...

Open Data & CKAN Training Program kicking off today

Effective data management is crucial for public administrations, who collect large amounts of diverse data on a daily basis. They differ from other data-collecting organizations in the sense that the ...

Leveraging CKAN for publishing open data in Germany

DataCity is a project aimed at creating a single repository of all municipal data in Israel. In my presentation at this years’ PyCon Israel, I’ll talk about the project and the Python toolset we’ve bu...

Making our Municipalities more Transparent using Python

We at the PortalJS team are longtime fans of the FiveThirtyEight website. We consider the authors one of the best in their business when it comes to data journalism and data visualization. Having said...

Data.fivethirtyeight.com reimagined with PortalJS

Working in the fast-growing area of open data, we build open source tools to drive transparency, accountability and re-use. Based on CKAN, we‘ve built the the official national data portals from the U...

Senior Python Web Developer wanted

As Open Data Northern Ireland (NI) roll out their new strategy focusing on more open data publications in the civil service and better community outcomes, the future for Open Government in NI looks br...

Open Data Northern Ireland looks to an Open Government future with Datopian

After years of work fine tuning our products and developing and expanding our services, we thought it’s time our website reflected how far we’ve come. Here’s a quick overview of some of what’s new.Eve...

Check out our new website!

A crucial tool for any organization, data portals perform a range of functions, from providing an easily-searchable catalog of your data to enabling data visualizations and enhancement. This article i...

A Brief Introduction to Data Portals

In our last article, we explored the Open Spending revamp. Now, let's dive into the tech stack that makes it tick. We'll unpack how PortalJS, Cloudflare R2, Frictionless Data Packages, and Octokit com...

The OpenSpending Revamp: Behind the Scenes

As the Scottish Cities Alliance invest in new technologies to create ‘Scotland’s eighth city - the smart city’ to accelerate and transform service delivery, Datopian’s open source, collaborative and c...

Scottish Cities Alliance progressing towards Smart Cities with Datopian

You’ve heard of a content management system (CMS), but have you heard of a data management system (DMS)? In this article, we show that the two aren’t all that different. Just as many companies turn in...

As CMS is to Content, DMS is to Data

Whether it’s fighting climate change or finding the nearest bus stop, creating insight requires data. The higher the quality of that data, the greater and more reliable the insight. What does good dat...

How to climb the Data Quality Pyramid

OpenSpending is one of the longest-running projects both at Open Knowledge Foundation and within the open data ecosystem in its entirety. Starting life in 2009 as Where Does my Money Go?, OpenSpending...

OpenSpending stewardship moving to Datopian

At Datopian, we've long been passionate about the potential of open data to foster transparency, informed decision-making, and innovation. We don’t just recognize the power and the potential of open d...

The Open Spending Revamp

Norway has launched its most ambitious research infrastructure yet — the NIRD Research Data Archive, a national-scale platform for long-term scientific data preservation and sharing. Built on CKAN and...

Powering Norway’s Largest Scientific Data Archive: How We Helped Build NIRD with CKAN

Finding open source software that creates both beautiful and customised contact forms for your website is tricky. Software that allows you to store responses, inform you of new contact requests, enabl...

Contact form providers

Hello. I’m Paul Walsh and I am the new CEO of Viderum. I moved to Viderum after 5 years at Open Knowledge International, where I have been on the Senior Management Team as Chief Product Officer and in...

Viderum in 2019

As open data continues to play a pivotal role in supporting the response to the covid-19 crisis, Datopian spoke with Open Data NZ’s, Paul Stone, on the extraordinary work they’re doing in supporting o...

How Open Data can help build Resilient Communities

Back in 2006, two journalists from The Guardian wrote the article Give us back our crown jewels, in which they pleaded for the UK government to collect the best data possible and to make it freely ava...

Open data, a lifeline for journalism?

In this article, we share our tips (and traps to avoid!) on working seamlessly in a remote-working setup.Team member exploring trekking as a physical activityWhile many governments and organisations a...

Tips on Remote Working: How we do it at Datopian!

Hey everyone! 👋 Summer has been in full swing, and while I've managed to catch some vacation vibes, I've also been deep into code. I'm super excited to share some of the latest updates and features w...

What We Shipped in Jul-Aug 2023

Today we are announcing OpenClaw Autopilot.It is our new personal AI product designed to work where people already communicate: chat apps like Telegram and WhatsApp.Most assistants are still session-b...

Introducing OpenClaw Autopilot: Your AI. Anywhere.

Data has become increasingly intertwined with our daily lives as more companies collect, analyze, and utilize it—and its use is growing exponentially. Data is everywhere. IoT is opening up new possibi...

On the Value of Data

Northern Ireland, with an estimated population of just under 2 million, hopped onto the open data bandwagon in 2015. Journalist Frédéric Dubois talked to OpenDataNI’s Cormac McConaghy to find out what...

Northern Ireland: One year of open data “by default”?

The call for action to respond to the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has led many public groups and private organisations on a quest to find new approaches or solutions in dealing with this urgent prob...

So you want to join a Covid-19 Data Hackathon

Currently, CKAN implicitly has four distinct components:Because the DB is usually a separate service we might not strictly consider if part of CKAN as a project (hence the dashed line in the diagram)....

A more decoupled CKAN: making CKAN easier to customize, maintain and extend

It's the World Environment Day - the United Nations day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment.A lot has been said on the value of data and its correlation to tackli...

Datopian, Open Data and the Environment

Metadata is often described as “data about data”—and for good reason. It provides the crucial context needed to understand, discover, and reuse datasets effectively. In open data portals, high-quality...

AI-driven Metadata Enrichment in Open Data Portals: A Deep Dive

What do the Victorian physician John Snow, a Danish toilet-locating app, and our president, Rufus, have in common? The punchline: they were all inspired by open data. This article explores a term stil...

What is Open Data?

November 10, 2016 by Frederic Dubois- The king has decided! 5,000 municipalities are going open data in early 2017. Guess where…
\- Hmmm.
\- Let me give you a hint: it's in Europe…
\- Hmmm, a king in ...

Open data: think local, act local

Across governments, startups, universities, and Fortune 500s, a shift is happening. Teams are moving away from proprietary software and embracing open source. This isn’t about saving a few bucks on li...

Discover why open source is becoming the top choice for governments, enterprises, and high-performance teams. Learn about the benefits, myths, and what makes it a smart move in 2025.

Why More Organizations Are Switching to Open Source (And Why Yours Might, Too)

In this interview Rufus Pollock, president at Datopian, discusses the importance of Open Data, the fact that information alone is not enough to ensure wise decision-making and the potential of Renumer...

Will the revolution be open?

Our colleagues at the Open Knowledge Foundation announced the Joint Stewardship of Frictionless Data in December 2019. Some of that announcement post is below, and I also wanted to give some more cont...

Announcing Frictionless Data Joint Stewardship

2019 has been a great year at Datopian, and we wanted to take this opportunity to share with our clients, partners, and the wider community some reflections on the year past, and thoughts on 2020.Afte...

Datopian: 2019 in review, and looking toward 2020

CKAN and Datopian DMS (which is built on CKAN) are an integrated data management solution for managing metadata and data. It provides non-specialist users with an easy-to-use interface, while deep ext...

Understanding access permissioning with CKAN and Datopian DMS

Energinet is preparing for a new future of renewable energy using integrated open energy data on a CKAN platform in collaboration with Datopian.Photo by Adrien Hobbs on UnsplashAn independent public e...

Energinet sees a Green Energy Future alongside Datopian

At Viderum, we want to make open data simple. And we want you to get the most out of your CKAN portal. So, today, we’re starting a series of video tutorials showing how to do different tasks within CK...

New CKAN video tutorial series

The Frictionless specifications are helping with simplifying data validation for applications in production at the European Union.Do you remember Costas Simatos? He introduced the Frictionless Data co...

A Short Case Study Involving Table Schema Frictionless Specs at the European Union

Open data service provider Viderum is working with Energinet.dk, the gas and electricity operator in Denmark, to share near real-time access to Danish energy data. Using CKAN, an open-source platform ...

Danish Energinet will use CKAN to launch Energy DataStore - a free and open portal for sharing energy data

It's Friday! Many people are waiting for the weekend while we are having an Internal Friday Hackathon! The main goal? To ship out a functioning decoupled frontend after focussed work from our develope...

Internal Friday Hackathon at Datopian: MasterMinds at work!

We'd like to congratulate Muhammad Ismail Shahzad and Shubham Mahajan for getting their CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) and CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) certifications!We...

Datopians of the month: Ismail & Shubham got their Kubernetes certifications

Greetings from the vibrant world of Datopian! We are thrilled to announce an exciting event that's currently unfolding in our digital workspace. Our dedicated team is engaged in an internal hackathon ...

Internal PortalJS Hackathon at Datopian: MasterMinds at work!

Traveling Datopians is a series of photo essays and journals documenting the adventures of Datopian colleagues, many of whom have used the freedom that comes with our remote-first culture to take thei...

Traveling Datopians: Patricio in Europe

At Datopian, we believe in the transformative power of open data to drive innovation, transparency, and informed decision-making. With recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we see an ex...

AI Meets Open Data: How Datopian Enhances Data Discovery and Insights

He’s speaking again! Here’s a brief overview of why you’ll want to tune in to this year’s edition of SEMIC next week to hear Rufus’ insights on interoperability.



On 15th October 2020, policymakers,...

Datopian founder and CTO, Rufus Pollock, to speak at the EU’s annual semantic interoperability conference (SEMIC)

When it comes to data, the energy industry is similar to any other: data can provide clarity and insight in ways that were unachievable only a couple of decades ago. There is no limit to the metaphori...

The Impact of Data on the Energy Industry

With a long history in statistical software, the SIS-CC, under the OECD secretariat, recently launched the .Stat Suite in open source. To meet the challenges in making this transition, they turned to ...

OECD’s SIS-CC .Stat Suite goes Open Source with Datopian

Last Friday, a spirit of creativity and collaboration filled the virtual halls of Datopian as we embarked on an interesting journey: our internal PortalJS Hackathon. This event set the stage for our t...

An Inside Look at Datopian's PortalJS Internal Hackathon #1!

June 22, 2020 by Annabel van DaalenThree months on from Open Data Day 2020 and the reports are out: from budget data in Indonesia and Uganda to renewable energy data in Germany, Datopian’s mini-grants...

Open Data Day 2020 - Mini-Grant Outcomes

Once upon a time, more and more organizations such as enterprises, governments, and NGOs had more and more data from more and more sources, both internal and external. They knew (or felt) that it must...

Once upon a time in data land … more and more organizations had more and more data

If you’re still running your open data portal on DKAN 1.x, you’re not alone — but you are increasingly at risk. With DKAN 1.x officially deprecated and no longer actively maintained, organizations rel...

Still on DKAN 1.x? Here’s Why It’s Putting Your Data Portal at Risk

Hey everyone! Remember when we announced the launch of MarkdownDB not too long ago? It was pretty exciting stuff, and if you missed it, you can catch up on all the details in our previous post right h...

Unveiling MarkdownDB's Latest Features: Export to JSON, task extraction, and computed fields

In a previous article, we drew an analogy between CMS (that’s ‘content management system’) and DMS (‘data management system’) to show how the two software share a similar structure. Now, in this follo...

Datopian Presents: Headless DMS

Hi there, My name is Gift Egwuenu and I’m super excited to share I joined Datopian as a Frontend Developer and Developer Evangelist! 🎉Frictionless Data is an open-source toolkit that brings simplicit...

Joining the Frictionless Data Team

Hello, dear readers!We're excited to announce the official launch of MarkdownDB, an open-source library to transform markdown content into sql-queryable data. Get a rich SQL API to your markdown files...

Announcing MarkdownDB: an open source tool to create an SQL API to your markdown files! 🚀

NASA’s flagship open data portal (https://data.nasa.gov/) has just relaunched on an open-source CKAN stack – an exciting shift away from a proprietary platform.NASA recently relaunched its open data p...

CKAN vs Socrata: Why NASA Chose Open Source for Its Open Data Platform

The following is a transcript of a Q\&A with Datopian Founder and President Rufus Pollock about the vision for Datopian over the long-term.We think there is a huge opportunity around data management i...

Datopian Vision Q&A: the need for Data Management, DataOS, Open Source and more

If you have been following our recent work, you may have noticed two announcements that felt a little different from what we typically publish: OpenClaw Autopilot, a chat-native AI agent that lives in...

Where Datopian Is Heading: AI-First Data Infrastructure for Real Business Decisions

We are now 8 weeks into the Official Inquiries project. One of the most time-consuming challenges the project faces is that of turning PDF files of inquiries into clean, readable text. Converting a PD...

Testing PDF Extraction Tools

We are now in the 11th week of our Official Inquiries project. This month, we managed to introduce a simple search feature to the website, that will allow visitors to the site to search the text inqui...

September Update!

Opening data is one thing. Many open knowledge activists out there will cheer when seeing yet another city making some of its public interest information available to the rest of us. There is also rea...

Escaping ‘data blindness’ with the help of data visualisation

We live in a world awash with data, but it's not just about having data. It's what you do with it that counts. You're out there, data warriors, fighting the good fight. You've got insights that could ...

DataHub Cloud Launch on Open Data Day: Build elegant data-driven sites with markdown & deploy in seconds

Who would have thought? When I wrote “You think open source is boring? Think again” in 2004, I never could have dreamt that it would still be relevant twelve years later. Open source is not only alive...

Beyond theory: does open source really matter?

We are happy to announce that CKAN is now available under the G-Cloud 9 framework. This special program creating a digital marketplace for cloud-based solutions was created by the UK government to i...

CKAN now available on G-Cloud 9

We know many people and organizations around the world are experiencing challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to reach out to our partners and clients to assure you of Datopian’s work cap...

Datopian and COVID-19

https://rufuspollock.com/2015/12/06/ckan-technical-roadmap-thoughts-dec-2015/Here is an overview of the different feature clusters of a full portal:Source: https://tech.datopian.com/Data Portals are r...

CKAN: Some Ideas for the Road Ahead

I was recently faced with the problem of finding an apartment in Berlin. As you might have heard, this task is not getting easier over time. For foreigners who don’t speak German fluently especially, ...

Running a scraping platform at Google Cloud for as little as US$ 0.05/month

There are a number of note-taking applications in the market, but if you are a power user, it can be hard to find exactly the “right solution”. Depending on your needs, you may want to use several dif...

Note Taking Software

Discover how SSEN leveraged open energy data to enhance grid management and operational efficiency. Explore the advanced data solutions driving SSEN's digital transformation.

Open Energy Data Initiative: SSEN's Digital Transformation (A technical case study)

Datopian partnered with the International Digital Policy Observatory (IDPO) to build a data portal and analytics platform that enables researchers and policymakers to explore global digital policy data across 50 countries through interactive dashboards, structured datasets, and automated research updates.

Global Digital Policy Data Portal Built with CKAN & PortalJS | IDPO Case Study

Building a Digital Policy Data Platform for the International Digital Policy Observatory with CKAN and PortalJS

Discover how Datopian developed a centralized, bilingual data portal for AIR’s TechSprint, enabling seamless access to datasets, problem statements, and metadata tools for impactful anti-corruption solutions.

Driving Innovation: AIR’s Data Portal for Fighting Corruption

Explore the OpenSpending revamp enhancing fiscal transparency and open government data. Discover a modern data platform that improves data integrity, accessibility, and citizen engagement.

Open Government Data: Revamping OpenSpending for Fiscal Transparency

How Lincolnshire County Council reduced costs and simplified management by migrating their open data portal from CKAN to PortalJS Cloud.

How Lincolnshire County Council reduced costs and simplified management by migrating their open data portal from CKAN to PortalJS Cloud. Complete case study with results.

Lincolnshire County Council CKAN to PortalJS Cloud Migration Case Study | Datopian

How Lincolnshire County Council Modernised Its Open Data Portal with PortalJS Cloud

Explore how SSEN leverages CKAN and PortalJS for open energy data management. Learn about their innovative data portal enhancing transparency, accessibility, and stakeholder engagement.

Open Energy Data: SSEN's Innovative CKAN Data Portal

How Datopian enhanced Montreal's CKAN-based open data portal with unified search, Hochelaga design system integration, and citation tools for better data discoverability.

City of Montreal Open Data Portal: CKAN Customization & Design System Integration

Enhancing Montreal's Open Data Portal: Unified Search and Design System Integration

The OECD’s SIS-CC needed expert guidance to transition its .Stat Suite — a global data dissemination platform — to a fully open-source model. Datopian worked with the community to design an open-source strategy, improve DevOps practices, and implement modern CI/CD workflows. The result was a sustainable framework that enabled faster deployments, better modularity, and active community collaboration.

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

A CKAN data portal with multilingual support, GDPR compliance, ISO/IEC 27001 standards, and WordPress integration for improved data transparency and public access.

Open Data Denmark's Open Data Portal: Multilingual Support & Security

Discover how Datopian evolved SSEN's CKAN and PortalJS data portal with a community innovation platform, real-time outage notifications, self-service visualization builder, unified document library, and intelligent event management.

SSEN Data Portal Phase 4: Community Platform, Real-time Outages & Self-Service Analytics | Case Study | Datopian

Open Energy Data: SSEN Transforms Its Data Portal into a Community Ecosystem (Phase 4)

Datopian built a modern open data portal for the City of Ann Arbor using CKAN and PortalJS with SSO, DCAT metadata, Section 508–compliant design, and a fast frontend.

City of Ann Arbor Open Data Portal | CKAN + PortalJS by Datopian

A Faster, Smarter Open Data Portal for the City of Ann Arbor

Learn how Datopian helped FIND consolidate scattered diagnostics datasets into DxCONNECT — a unified open data portal built on CKAN and PortalJS, with custom metadata schema, advanced faceted search, and GitHub-powered content management for global health data.

From Data Silos to Open Data Portal: How FIND Centralized Its Diagnostics Data | Case Study | Datopian

From Data Silos to Open Data Portal: How FIND Centralized Its Global Diagnostics Data

Discover how a global firm improved internal data management with a CKAN-powered data catalog. Explore its seamless integration and enhanced accessibility.

Internal Data Catalog: A Journey to Better Data Management with CKAN

The Open Data Northern Ireland (NI) portal was developed as part of the Digital NI initiative. The government of Northern Ireland is committed to open data because they recognise that opening up data increases transparency, accountability and efficiency of the public sector. Moreover, they welcome the opportunity presented by open data to encourage new commercial activities and encourage economic growth.

Open Data Northern Ireland

Explore Santa Monica's successful migration from Socrata to CKAN. Learn how this transition enhanced data control, cost-efficiency, and flexibility within a 30-day deadline.