CKAN is an open-source data management system for building data hubs and data portals to publish, share and use data. Governments use it for official open-data portals, and enterprises use it to manage internal data assets. It is written mainly in Python, has an API, extensions and a DataStore extension. Examples of users include data.gov.uk, the Dutch National Data Register and Data.gov in the United States. You install and run CKAN yourself or engage a commercial service provider.
CKAN is released under the GNU AGPL v3.0. According to its website, the project's assets are held in trust by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit; Datopian and Link Digital act as co-stewards of the project. Because the source code is public and no hosted service is required, the organisation decides where the system runs and where data resides, for example in a European data centre. Anyone engaging an external provider needs to assess that provider's hosting location and jurisdiction separately.