The source code for this site, HealthData.gov, will be made available to the public under an open source license. We are making the source code available so that:
- You can submit improvements to the website in the form of a git pull request.
- You can get a better understanding of how HealthData.gov works.
HealthData.gov is based on Drupal 7 (for www.healthdata.gov) and CKAN 1.7 (for hub.healthdata.gov). We wrote several custom modules to pass data back and forth between Drupal and CKAN.
Because of Drupal's architecture of storing configuration and data in the same database, the source code is not enough to run your own local instance of HealthData.gov. You will also need our boostrapping database (mysql dump file to be published here in the future).
Our code for the Drupal site is licensed as a whole under the terms of the GNU GPL license. Some parts are based on the CKAN module for Drupal orignally created for Data.gov.uk, which was licensed under the terms of the GPL. Our additions, as work of the federal government, are public domain. The license is similar for the CKAN site. Our customization of CKAN as a whole is licensed under the GNU AGPL license because the CKAN source code on which it is based is AGPL-licensed. Our additions, however, are public domain. (See the GNU GPL frequently asked questions for how this works.)
Questions about the source code and discussion about the HealthData.gov project take place on the HealthDataGov Google Group.
The code and further documentation will be found Github (public repositories coming very soon!).