New open source foundation forms

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A new open source group, the Annodex Foundation, will be launched at the Australian Linux Conference being held in New Zealand this week.

Annodex is the open source technology that allows the creation of audiovisual content as 'webs' of audio and video, which are fully integrated with the text-based search and surfing capabilities of the World Wide Web.

Increasing activity and uptake of the open media technology has spurred creation of the foundation.

Head of the Annodex development team at the CSIRO ICT Centre, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, said the technology is an open framework for media content that enables audio and video to be shared as hyperlinkable and searchable Web resources allowing for Web 2.0 conformant media applications.

Pfeiffer said Annodex has been developed by the CeNTIE (Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy) project within the CSIRO ICT Centre, but with a strong involvement of the open source community, in particular the Xiph.Org Foundation.

Dr Gautam Tendulkar, general manager, commercialization for CSIRO ICT, says that Annodex has now reached the stage where it requires an independent organization to support developer and user communities.

"Like other maturing open source projects, the Annodex community has therefore organized itself into a Foundation," Tendulkar said.

"The CSIRO is actively supporting the Annodex Foundation with resources and is a member on the foundation's advisory panel. We are proud to be contributing the open source software and open Annodex standards to the foundation and will continue to research into further Annodex-based technology."

The foundation has about 35 founding members and has elected a managing committee, which is headed by Jeff Waugh who is a member on the Gnome Foundation Board.

"By having a single group coordinating the software development, we can create a set of international standards which will support a common language amongst content developers and ensure the growth of the software," Waugh said.

CeNTIE is supported by the Australian Government through the Advanced Networks Program of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.