Last summer, we adopted CKAN as our data store/repository/catalogue. At that time, I noted that much had happened in the CKAN project in the few months since the start of the Orbital project in November 2011 that made CKAN a more attractive proposition for managing research data.
Recently, someone on the CKAN mailing list pointed to the graph below, which shows that the interest in CKAN has exploded. In November 2011, interest in CKAN was at just a quarter of its current peak, which is double that of September 2012, when we made the switch to CKAN. Following the European Commission and the UK government, the recent decision by the US government to adopt CKAN for the next version of data.gov will only drive interest in and the development of CKAN even further.
It is an exciting time to be observing and part of this explosion of interest. However, it is worth remembering that the interest in CKAN and data management is still very small compared to interest in other, more generic, content management systems. Publishing structured open data remains a niche interest compared to other open practices on the web, such as blogging. Here’s the graph comparing CKAN to WordPress.
Perhaps a fairer comparison would be that of CKAN with open access repository software, such as ePrints and DSpace.
Of course, the cumulative interest of DSpace and of ePrints over the years is greater than that of CKAN, but right now, there is clearly more interest in CKAN and publishing open data, than there is in open access repository software. The open access movement has matured, while the open data movement is growing rapidly. It will be interesting to follow these trends to measure (in part) the maturity of the open data movement, too.