Exploring CKAN data portals with QGIS

CKAN is for data portals what QGIS is for GIS. The project describes itself as

CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is aimed at data publishers wanting to make their data open and available.

Many open (government) data platforms rely on CKAN and while the web interface is pretty good, there’s still the hassle of finding and downloading the data using a web browser.

This is where the QGIS CKAN-Browser plugin comes in useful. The plugin has been developed by BergWerkGIS for the state of Carinthia, Austria and added to the public plugin repo earlier this year. CKAN-Browser comes preconfigured with some Austrian and European CKAN URLs for testing, so you can get going really quickly. It is easy to search for specific datasets or explore the portal’s data categories and it is just one click to download and load the data into your QGIS map:

Here’s a quick demo of loading a vector dataset as well as raster tiles:

For the full usage guide, visit the plugin’s Github page.

It’s great to see how well CKAN and QGIS can play together to enable seamless access to open data!