A recap of what the CKAN community covered on June 17, 2026: a live demo of the new CKAN Ecosystem Catalog, a deep-dive into HDX Tabular Data Endpoints, the launch of the new community discussion forum — and, surprise surprise, a very unexpected use of CKAN as a sheet music directory with AI-assisted metadata. Yes, really.
Session #41 of CKAN Monthly Live brought together contributors, implementers, and community members on June 17, 2026 — covering the new CKAN Ecosystem Catalog, a deep-dive into the Humanitarian Data Exchange and its Tabular Data Endpoints, the launch of the revived CKAN community forum, and an unconventional use case: a CKAN-powered sheet music directory with AI-assisted metadata management.
This recap covers each session topic in full. If you have a CKAN use case to share at a future session, there's a form in the meeting notes document.
The CKAN Ecosystem Catalog (ecosystem.ckan.org) is a searchable directory of CKAN sites, extensions, and tools — built to increase visibility across the ecosystem and make it easier for organisations to discover what's been built on CKAN worldwide.
Joel Natividad (datHere) demonstrated the catalog live during the session. It uses metadata schemas for categorisation and allows community members to register their own sites or curate existing entries.
The catalog is a starting point, not a finished product. Planned next steps include integration with the new CKAN discussion forum, namespace collision checks, and exploration of linked data and federated search capabilities.
The catalog is an evolving starting point — it will improve as more sites are identified. Add yours.
The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is a UN OCHA data product built on CKAN — one of the most significant open-data platforms powered by CKAN in production today.
Nadine Levin (OCHA / HDX) introduced the platform, which covers diverse formats including geospatial and tabular data, and has seen significant usage spikes during global crises including COVID-19 and the Ukraine conflict.
Tabular Data Endpoints (TDE) is HDX's newly launched feature providing stable API access to tabular resources via DataStore and the DataPusher Plus extension. TDE exposes search, SQL, and info endpoints — applied to curated, schema-stable datasets. Nadine demonstrated this live with Ebola case tracking data for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
HDX has also launched a new Gitbook with comprehensive API documentation and Python notebooks to help the community build pipelines and visualisations. Coming up on the HDX roadmap: an open API specification, a site-wide redesign, data dictionary integration, and technical schema enforcement to improve data quality at scale.
During Q&A, Ian Ward asked about schema enforcement and data validation for HDX pipelines. Nadine explained that HDX is exploring the Table Designer feature and drawing lessons from previous attempts — including the "Happy" project — to improve data interoperability.
HDX provides raw data access — but challenges remain around data complexity and context, especially in crisis situations where modelling is required for effective aid distribution.
The CKAN community forum is a new Discourse-based space for non-technical community conversations — funding, events, portal operations, and community strategy — hosted on the Open Knowledge Foundation's platform.
Jamaica Jones (University of Pittsburgh / POSE programme) introduced the forum, which fills the gap that GitHub Discussions (support) and Gitter (developer chat) don't cover. It is part of the NSF-funded POSE programme, which supports open-source ecosystem sustainability.
Jamaica conducted a live collaborative activity during the session to surface shared interests and potential collaboration opportunities — findings will be shared back with the community on the forum. Joel Natividad encouraged everyone to register and contribute to early discussions, including upcoming topics like AI crawlers.
The forum is designed for the conversations that don't belong on GitHub — funding, events, portal operations, and community strategy.
Can CKAN be used outside of government data portals? Wolfgang Clauss (from Ondics) answered with a working demo: a sheet music directory extension that extends CKAN's standard metadata schema with musical attributes — instrument, part, composer, and style — and enables users to download PDFs with embedded music metadata for import into external applications.
Viewing, playback, and export. Users can browse sheet music and immediately play associated YouTube videos for reference — the extension executes YouTube searches and selects the best-matching video for each piece. Search results can be exported as CSV files or sent directly to Dropbox for use in mobile music-playing applications, making the portal practical for performers on the go.
Licensing and security. To protect intellectual property, the extension includes licensing security: users must log in before viewing or accessing protected PDF resources. CKAN's existing access control infrastructure handles this with minimal customisation — no new security layer needed.
AI-assisted metadata generation is the standout feature: users input a title and the system generates metadata suggestions — composer, style, description — via Google Gemini or OpenAI ChatGPT, dramatically reducing manual data-entry effort.
The extension redefines CKAN organisations as collections (digital songbooks), enabling groups of musicians or ensembles to build curated libraries. Collections can be packed into tar or zip archives and shared between different CKAN instances equipped with the extension — inter-instance sharing built on standard CKAN APIs.
The extension will be released as open source — Wolfgang noted that no existing competitive metadata management solutions for musicians were found. He also previewed two upcoming projects: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for CKAN and an Open Data App Store, a platform for hosting apps that consume open-source datasets, built on the premise that standard CKAN previews lack the visual appeal and interactive capabilities users need to effectively engage with data.
CKAN was never designed for sheet music — but the data model transfers perfectly. Instruments, composers, and styles are just metadata fields. Any structured collection of resources can be a CKAN dataset.
— Wolfgang Clauss, Ondics
What does HDX do to ensure data quality and schema consistency across its 1,900+ sources?
Nadine Levin explained that HDX is exploring the Table Designer feature and drawing on lessons from previous attempts — including the "Happy" project — to improve data interoperability across its 1,900+ sources.
Community question
Can CKAN be used to manage non-government, non-open-data collections — like sheet music?
Wolfgang Clauss confirmed the sheet music extension will be released as open source and submitted to the Ecosystem Catalog — demonstrating that CKAN's metadata model applies to any structured collection of resources.
There are three things you can do right now: register on the CKAN community forum and introduce yourself, add your CKAN site or extension to the Ecosystem Catalog, or help test CKAN 2.12 by picking up an open issue on GitHub.
If you have a CKAN use case — standard or unusual — we'd love to feature it at a future CKAN Monthly Live. Use the suggestion form in the meeting notes document to put your project forward. CKAN Monthly Live #42 takes place on the third Wednesday of July 2026.
Wolfgang from Ondics built an open source sheet music catalog on CKAN — with AI metadata generation, YouTube playback, and cross-instance sharing. Here's how.
CKAN 2.12 is the most significant release in years. The code is ready — what it ships as depends on how many people test it, translate it, and review the docs over the coming weeks.
