Datasettea

Datasettea is an open-source platform that enables publishing and exploring structured data as interactive web portals. It provides a browsable, searchable interface for datasets and exposes programmatic access through a REST API. It supports rendering results as tables, charts, and basic dashboards, and can be deployed as a static site or run as a lightweight server.

Origin and scope: Datasettea draws on ideas from data cataloging and publishing tools and was developed to improve reproducibility and discoverability of datasets. The project is community-driven with a permissive license and has ecosystem plugins for ingestion, authentication, and visualization.

Architecture: At its core is a data store, commonly SQLite, with a server layer that serves HTML views and API endpoints. A templating and UI layer presents tables, filters, and facets. A plugin system allows extensions for ingestion, authentication, visualization, and export. It also supports data versioning and provenance metadata.

Features: Data discovery via faceted filtering and full-text search; robust export options (CSV, JSON, XML); embeddable dashboards and charts; access control and authentication; data lineage, versioning, and audit logging; import from CSV/JSON/SQL; deployment options include static site export or runtime server.

Reception and use cases: used by government agencies, research institutions, and NGOs to publish open data portals; strengths include rapid setup and reproducible data views; limitations include scalability for very large datasets and the need for careful security configuration.