Interoperable Open Data Platforms: A Prototype for Sharing CKAN Data Sources

Open data promotes transparency, accountability, and innovation in organizations and represents a central element of modern data management, supporting informed decision-making. CKAN is the world’s leading open-source data portal, widely used on national and local open-data platforms. However, CKAN installations are usually operated insularly, with limited interoperability and interaction between multiple instances. The induced separation is based on incompatible data models, leading to complex searches that include several open data platforms. In this paper, we describe a prototype that realizes an interoperability layer between CKAN instances and connects them in a data space. To create the intended solution, we relied on the Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC) open-source project and present details on our architectural approach and implementation. For evaluation, we conducted a series of focus group discussions with stakeholders of our prototype. We received mostly positive feedback on our developments, and the participants agreed that our solution could lead to an improved interoperability of open-data platforms.