Insights Dashboard

CKAN Portal Operations
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Hey everyone :waving_hand:

This is the home thread for the Insights Dashboard on the Ecosystem Catalog.

Quick background: once a week, the Catalog checks in on every public CKAN portal it has listed and keeps notes on what it finds (see Dataset ) ; which CKAN version a portal is running, which plugins are installed, how many datasets it has, and whether it was even up that week.

We’ve been collecting this since July 2025, so there’s a good bit of history building up now.

The Insights tab pulls all of that together into one place. Since a weekly check can miss things, the numbers are more useful as trends than as exact snapshots, and honestly the trends are where the fun stuff is anyway.

Now here’s where we’d love your help:

  • Seeing something off? If you run a portal and the data looks wrong, let us know. You know your setup way better than a weekly crawler does.
  • Anything surprise you? A plugin that’s more popular than you expected, an old version that just refuses to go away, a portal that’s grown like crazy. Share it!
  • Curious how it all works? Ask away. No question is too basic :slight_smile:

Go poke around and reply with whatever catches your eye. The more people dig into this, the more useful it gets for everyone.

~ Abdur Rahman
Product Owner, CKAN Ecosystem Catalog

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This is AMAZING! Reminds me of old Google Zeitgeist dashboard!

And this is just the beginning - all this great metadata can be used to help the CKAN Ecosystem become more of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive NETWORK its name portends! :slight_smile:

I always thought CKAN has largely untapped potential to help realize the network effects of TBL’s envisioned Web of Data during his 20th anniversary of the Web TED talk.

Perhaps, this is the first installment in building it from the bottom up for the CKAN ecosystem…

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Hi! Thanks for sharing. I’ve found a few CKAN based data catalogs that I’ve missed before and whole interface is good for analytics.

I would like to share too that there are much more CKAN based data catalogs across the World. I have 2021 registered CKAN instances in the Dateno data portals registry GitHub - datenoio/dataportals-registry: Registry of data portals, catalogs, data repositories including data catalogs dataset and catalog description standard · GitHub
1912 active, 94 inactive and 15 deprecated.

We crawl almost all of them with our Dateno search engine, just like many other data catalogs.

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That’s such a treat for the catalog :slightly_smiling_face: Thanks! 2,021 is an impressive number, although we do have a metadata field showing if the portal is active or not, but I’m curious to know how do you decide if the portal is active/ inactive or deprecated?

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Originally portal tagged as deprecated if it was replaced by some other software, right now most likely these records will be tagged as inactive instead. Portals are being rescanned at least once per 3 months from servers in US and Germany. If they resport at least one API endpoint they considered to be active. But actually this registry is more about reference data, not a monitoring system. Monitoring module is internal part of Dateno search engine and it’s quite complex since it works with dozens types of open data/geodata/scientific data software types, not just CKAN.

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