[topicmapmail] German Topic Map Engine developers wanted

[Thomas Schwotzer]

Hi,
I'm head of research of a medium software
company in Berlin, Germany (www.neofonie.de).
In March I additionally become Professor at
university of applied sciences in Brandenburg,
near Berlin.

I'm about creating a German consortium for a
project focusing on Topic Map based applications.
Actually, this consortium is nearly complete.

We have very good chances getting sponsored
by either our ministry of research and education
or ministry of economics.

Technical basis of this project will be - of
course - a Topic Map Engine. We plan to use
an open source implementation. That's a challenge.

There are a number open source TM engines in the
field. My impression is - and correct me if I'm wrong -
there are just a few active developers in each
project. Moreover, the number of OS platforms seems
to increase, e.g. at last TMRA workshop in Leipzig
I saw yet another new Java based platform beside TM4J.
At the end of this workshop we briefly discussed
the lack of a stable, well documented and de facto
standard open source implementation with a broad and
active developer community. Even commercial providers
like Ontopia agreed that this gap should be closed.

Thus, we plan to acquire a budget for a developer team
that joins an existing OS project like TM4J to make
it stable enough for our applications.

Who is interested and able to lead such a team?
You must work in Germany because we focus on
German research programs. You also must work
at a research institute or a small or medium sized
company that is willing to join the consortium.

Kind regards, Thomas

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schwotzer
Fachhochschule Brandenburg
University of Applied Sciences