What's the difference between Organizations & Groups in CKAN?

Question

What are Groups? You can use CKAN Groups to create and manage collections of datasets. This could be to catalogue datasets for a particular project or team, or on a particular theme, or as a very simple way to help people find and search your own published datasets.

What are Organizations? CKAN Organizations are used to create, manage and publish collections of datasets. Users can have different roles within an Organization, depending on their level of authorisation to create, edit and publish.

Both are used to create and manage collections of datasets.

Can someone please explain the difference between Organizations & Groups in CKAN?

Answer 1

The difference is all about authorization. If you're an editor or admin of an organization, then you can create new datasets in that organization and you can edit the datasets that belong to the organization. If you're an editor or admin of a group, all you can do is take existing datasets that are already on the site and add them to the group, or remove datasets from the group, you can't create new datasets or edit the datasets that belong to the group.

Also, organizations can contain private datasets that are only visible to the members of the organization, groups can't.

Organizations are controlling which users can add, update and publish which datasets. Every dataset in CKAN must belong to exactly one organization. If a user is an editor or admin of an organization, then she can create new datasets in that organization, and can edit and publish the datasets that belong to that organization. For example, think of a national government open data site where each government department has its own organization and manages its own data and users.

Groups on the other hand are about curation - collecting datasets together into groups. If a user is an editor or admin of a group, then they can add datasets (that already exist on the site) into their group and can remove datasets from their group, but they cannot necessarily add new datasets to the site, or edit the datasets that are in their group. Groups are meant to be used by the community of users of a site (the people consuming the data, not the people who're publishing the datasets on the site) to collect related datasets together into themes like "climate" etc.