CKAN Feeds

Introduction

Access to the CKAN metadata is provided in the RESTful API, but to help users in touch with changes to the data, CKAN also provides feeds. The main feed provides a list of recent changes to all packages, and there are also individual feeds for each package.

Requests

The main feed is at:

/revision/list?format=atom&days=1

For example, to see all the changes made to packages on ckan.net in the past day, browse address: http://ckan.net/revision/list?format=atom&days=1

In addition, each package has a feed at:

/package/history/PACKAGENAME?format=atom&days=7

You might want to keep track of developments of the Ordnance Survey open data seen here http://ckan.net/package/ordnance_survey, for example. Here is the corresponding URL you’d add to your RSS/Atom Reader: http://ckan.net/package/history/ordnance_survey?format=atom&days=7

Format

The feeds are in Atom format.

Each ‘entry’ in the feed corresponds to a Revision, which is a set of changes.

The Package feed is a subset of the Main Feed, with only the Revisions that reflect a change in that particular package.

The details given for each Revision are:

Field	Description
updated / published	Date & time of the change, given in ISO format.
author	‘name’ is login name or IP address.
link	Link to Revision in the web interface.
summary	Log message for the revision. Also, for the main feed, details of packages changes, created and deleted. See below.

Example main feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="None">
  <title>CKAN Package Revision History</title>
  <link href="/revision/list/" rel="alternate"></link>
  <id>/revision/list/</id>
  <updated>2010-04-18T21:17:57Z</updated>
  <entry>
    <title>rdbc6b54d-1fd1-4b13-b250-340a01646909 [pgcanada:]</title>
    <link href="/revision/read/dbc6b54d-1fd1-4b13-b250-340a01646909" rel="alternate"></link>
    <updated>2010-04-18T21:17:57Z</updated>
    <author><name>208.65.246.156</name></author>
    <id>tag:,2010-04-18:/revision/read/dbc6b54d-1fd1-4b13-b250-340a01646909</id>
    <summary type="html">Packages affected: [pgcanada:created].</summary>
  </entry>
  <!-- ...other entries... -->
</feed>

Example package feed for package ‘water_voles’:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="None">
  <title>CKAN Package Revision History</title>
  <link href="/revision/read/water_voles" rel="alternate"></link>
  <id>/revision/read/water_voles</id>
  <updated>2010-04-19T15:32:28Z</updated>
  <entry>
    <title>Creating test data.</title>
    <link href="/revision/read/2bad6982-2394-4187-b289-2ed77ad25d65" rel="alternate"></link>
    <updated>2010-04-19T15:30:00Z</updated>
    <published>2010-04-19T15:30:00Z</published>
    <author><name>http://someone.somecompany.com</name></author>
    <id>tag:,2010-04-19:/revision/read/2bad6982-2394-4187-b289-2ed77ad25d65</id>
    <summary type="html">Log message: Added a test package.</summary>
  </entry>
  <!-- ...other entries... -->
</feed>

Main feed summary

The main field provides a little more detail to the edits made to packages. In each entry summary, there is a list of packages affected, and the change to each is described as ‘created’, ‘updated’ or ‘deleted’. For example:

<summary type="html>Packages affected: [hospital_performance:created].</summary>

For package updates, some further information is provided if there are changes to the package’s resources, or the ‘date_updated’ extra field. For example:

Packages affected: [water_voles:updated:resources].

or:

Packages affected: [water_voles:updated:date_updated].

(The date_updated field is highlighted for a particular use of CKAN and this feature may be generalised in the future.)

A revision may have changes to several packages, particularly if it was created using the API. In this case, the package list is space separated:

Packages affected: [hospital_performance:created water_voles:updated bus_stops:updated:resources bus_stats:updated:resources:date_updated].</summary>