DEVELOPER TOOLS

A new open source software foundation, 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 Annodex has spurred its open source development community into creating the Annodex Foundation, making it sustainable outside its originating organization, the CSIRO. "The Annodex 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," says Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, head of the Annodex development team at the CSIRO ICT Centre. "Annodex has been developed by the CeNTIE 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, Commercialisation for the CSIRO ICT says that Annodex has now reached the stage where it requires an independent organisation to support the developer and user communities. "Like other maturing open source projects, the Annodex community has therefore organized itself into a Foundation," says Dr Tendulkar. "The CSIRO is actively supporting the Annode 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 into the foundation and will continue to research into further Annodex-based technology." The Foundation currently 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 and has experience in running a foundation. "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 insure the growth of the software," says Mr Waugh. "The Annodex Foundation has been created in the same spirit as other foundations based on free and open source software to support the growth of the Annodex community." Annodex has been developed by the CSIRO ICT Centre and the Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE). CeNTIE is supported by the Australian Government through the Advanced Networks Program (ANP) of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.