Brad KainA new client project targets the development of a knowledge management platform focused on modern slavery, forced and child labor. The target users of this system are researchers, policy experts, academics, and staff of government and non-governmental organizations working to address these global challenges. A key objective is to easily manage, publish, and visualize data sets related to these areas of study and policy making. We have therefore defined a system architecture with two major components – WordPress for general content management and CKAN to support the specialized workflow for managing quantitative datasets.
WordPress is a proven open source content management system, and will support day-to-day online publishing tasks.
- Creating, editing, and publishing web pages
- Publishing blog posts and articles, including text, images, and other rich media
- Managing taxonomies used in tagging conent, faceted search, and navigation
- Registration and user management, including roles and privileges
CKAN will provide the administrative backend for managing dataset and related assets – graphics, maps, and interactive data visualizations built using the D3 JavaScript library. We selected this open source platform because it offers impressive built-in functionality.
- Capability to easily upload and manage datasets by organization
- Web interface for searching and browsing datasets
- Capability for administrators to create and manage organizations, datasets, and users
- Email notifications for new or updated datasets based on administrator-specified triggers
- Capability to generate charts and graphs for an uploaded dataset
- Data automatically grouped by contributing organization and subject matter
- Capability to upload and publish pre-made data visualizations
- Role-based access to resources for users and administrators
Moreover, CKAN is extensible and can be customized for a fit-to-purpose system.
- Custom functionality is supported by plugins built by the CKAN community
- Custom forms support specialized workflow for data administration
- Backend is extensible to support calculations such as Sector’s Growth Factor (SGF)
- Custom visualizations can be easily published to provide interactive maps and charts to encourage user engagement
- Customized reports can be auto-generated for administrators
- CKAN is comprised of widely used technologies including Python, JavaScript, JQuery, PostgreSQL, and others
A future post will feature the Quoin Tech Talk and a more detailed look at CKAN as a platform for development.
