Page:The digital public domain.pdf/159

132 will be complex but, once achieved, will revolutionise the production and development of open knowledge.


 * 9. The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN)

Our CKAN project aims to encourage and support the emergence of a culture where knowledge packages can be easily discovered and plugged together as is currently possible with software. Named after software archives such as CPAN for Perl, CTAN for TeX, CRAN for R and so on, it is a registry for knowledge resources.

It is currently in beta and consists of a versioned database of metadata for large datasets and substantial collections of knowledge resources: “from genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics”. It gives the “lowest common denominator” of metadata for its packages: author, id, license, user-generated tags and links. We plan to add support for domain specific metadata. We are also planning to make provision for the automated installation of knowledge packages.