Challenge

Dashboard-oriented approach

Data portal approach

CKAN framework

Our vision

Path forward

• Encouraging more use cases and public engagement
• Sustainability/ease of maintanence
• User-friendly interface

A data portal is a site for storing a list of datasets with added features to facilitate accessing, viewing, and searching for any particular datasets.

• Examples:
  • Data.gov by the US government
  • Chicago Data Portal by City of Chicago

• Proven utility
  • Many use cases (e.g. Data.gov, Chicago Data Portal)
• Great for storing/sharing multiple datasets
  • Suitable for the R&A unit's "data clearinghouse" mission
  • Can have various formats of datasets (even dashboards)
• Ease of use and management
  • User interface
  • Access control

• The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network:

"CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data."

• Data.gov by the US government
• European Data Portal by the European Union
• opendata.swiss by the Swiss government
• And more!

Data.gov main page

opendata.swiss main page

• An actively managed/maintained open-source project
  • Free, flexible, and up-to-date
• Comes with a rich set of features for a fully-functionl data portal
  • Extensive documentation is available for various aspects/features
  • 200+ extensions exist to provide additional functionalities

• Flexibility and customizability in portal structure and look
• Elaborate access control
  • Organizations and groups
  • Capable of supporting a sustainable workflow
• Built-in visualizations
  • A simple "dashboard" view for each entry is available via an extension
• API for programmatic access to data
  • Great for research and application building
  • An entirely separate front-end interface is possible!

• Main page
  • Highlights, search bar, categories, some stats, etc.
• Data
  • Raw datasets (with metadata and simple visualizations)
  • Dashboards (with metadata)
• Articles
• Applications
  • Featuring user-made applications
• About
  • FQA, API documentation, Application guidelines, etc.

• Users with permission
  • upload/edit an item for internal view only
• Mangers
  • upload/edit/delete an item for internal and public views
• Administrators
  • manage organizations and groups
  • grant permissions as needed

• Data entries
  • Raw datasets, dashboards, publications
  • Metadata: brief descriptions, data dictionary, etc.
  • Tags for grouping/classifying entires
  • Data explorer and visualization views
  • API for programmatic access/use of data
• Articles
  • Existing articles on the current website
  • New articles

Data entry; image from CKAN Documentation

"View" options; image from CKAN Documentation

"Data Explorer" view; image from CKAN Documentation

Built-in graph; image from CKAN Documentation

Embedding a webpage; image from CKAN Documentation

Article page example

• Application programming interface (API)
  • Facilitating data access for research projects or building applications
• User-made applications
  • Applications meeting our standard -> featured on the Applications page
  • Providing an incentive to use our data -> more use cases
• Outreach effort
  • Raising awareness
  • Offering trainings on our UI/API
  • Hosting a "data challenge"? (e.g. 2015 Divvy Data Challenge)

Applications page example