Glossary
Definitions of key terms and concepts used throughout the NESO knowledge base.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Aircan | NESO's Airflow DAGs (datopian/aircan) that load data into the datastore. |
| Airflow | Open-source workflow orchestrator running the ingestion DAGs. |
| API token | A long-lived credential used by integrators to authenticate Data API requests. |
| BigQuery | The production datastore — holds the rows of tabular data behind every published resource. |
| CKAN | Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network — the open-source data catalog at the core of the stack and source of truth for metadata. |
| CKAN API | CKAN's RESTful API for managing datasets, resources, and metadata. PortalJS Admin is the primary client. |
| Cloudflare R2 | S3-compatible object storage used for uploaded resource files (via ckanext-s3filestore). |
| Data API | The read-only HTTP API in front of the datastore — the only path consumers use to read data. |
| Data schema | The structure of the actual data (CSV columns, JSON properties, etc.). |
| Dataset | A logical collection of data described by metadata. May contain one or more resources. |
| Datastore | The query backend (BigQuery in production, DuckLake planned) that holds the rows of tabular data. NESO replaces CKAN's built-in PostgreSQL datastore extension with this. |
| DuckLake | Planned datastore variant — a DuckDB-backed lakehouse for smaller, self-contained deployments. |
| DXP Frontend | Data Experience Portal — the public Drupal site users browse and search. |
| Environment | A deployed instance of the stack — development, staging, or production. |
| Feeds | Drupal module the DXP uses to pull metadata from CKAN every 5 minutes. |
| GKE | Google Kubernetes Engine — the managed Kubernetes service hosting the stack. |
| Grafana | The dashboard layer over Prometheus metrics. |
| Memcache / Varnish | DXP cache layers — entity cache (Memcache) and rendered HTML cache (Varnish). |
| Metadata schema | The set of required and optional fields a dataset must populate, defined via ckanext-scheming. |
| Organization | A CKAN organisation — a unit that owns datasets and groups its members. |
| PortalJS Admin | The Next.js admin UI for dataset management, user roles, and publishing workflows. |
| Prometheus | The metrics scraper feeding Grafana. |
| Publisher | A user with permission to create and publish datasets in their organisation. |
| Resource | A single file or URL belonging to a dataset (CSV, JSON, API endpoint, etc.). |
| Solr | CKAN's search index for metadata. |
ckanext-aircan | CKAN extension that triggers Airflow DAGs on dataset/resource events. |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-04
