Open Data

Nobody ratified CKAN's Action API as the open-data standard. It became one because government after government installed the same software, and a client written against one national portal now works against hundreds of city, state and research catalogues by changing a hostname. This is the only profile in the programme authored rather than derived — CKAN publishes no machine-readable specification of its own API.

Cohortversion-drift — the same software at releases spanning years, not independent reimplementations
StatusPublished — 134 actions graded from 36 live portal probes across 30 CKAN releases
Repositoryhttps://github.com/api-commons/open-data
Profiles1 in this domain

The CKAN Action API

63 core actions, measured by calling 36 live government portals. The interesting number is not the count but the gradient across releases.

Identifierckan-action-v3
OriginatorCKAN
Source of truth ckan/ckan — ckan/logic/action/*.py AGPL-3.0 (the software)
Pinned at 0731a7a4ab76dd11889eb89a892b3feae4fd69a8
134 actions, 65 of them reads. CKAN publishes no machine-readable specification, so the action list is enumerated from its own source. The AGPL governs the code, not a description of the HTTP surface it serves.
How it was measuredNever from our own catalog. Counting how often each action appears across our harvested artifacts gives status_show 81% and package_search 14% — a number that measures our harvester, which fingerprints portals by calling status_show. Instead 48 portals were probed read-only and 36 produced usable results. Every portal gets two controls: an action that cannot exist, and status_show, which every CKAN release has. The second is necessary because catalog.data.gov answers 404 to everything and would otherwise read as a portal implementing nothing.
TierWhat it covers
Core
63 operations		 Served by a majority of probed portals. status_show and organization_list_for_user reach 100%; package_search and package_list sit at 72.2% and 61.1%, because the oldest installs predate parts of the surface.
Extended
2 operations		 Only two actions land between 5% and 50% — organization_followee_count and user_show. On this cohort divergence is a version gradient rather than a spread of choices, so the middle band is nearly empty by nature.
Vendor
69 operations		 Under 5%, or not probed. Every write action is here: the probe runs anonymously against public-sector servers and never calls create, update, delete or patch.

48 implementations recorded · as of 2026-09-13

EvidenceCountMeaning
tested36The actions were called against a live portal. 6 serve the whole core tier; the rest serve part of it, which on this cohort usually means an older CKAN.
prose12Could not be probed — unreachable, refused at the edge, or unable to distinguish a present action from an absent one. No tier is recorded for any of them.

The full adopter registry · the adopter matrix — every entry carries the URL it was read from and the date it was read.

Artifacts

Licensing

The profile is authored from CKAN's own source and from live observation; it copies no document. CKAN the software is AGPL-3.0, which governs the code rather than a description of the HTTP surface it serves. API Commons artifacts are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and code is Apache-2.0. Nothing here implies endorsement by CKAN, by the Open Knowledge Foundation, or by any portal named in the registry.

Tags

Open DataGovernmentData

Further reading

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