Heading to OAI8

We’re excited to announce that in June we’re heading to the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva, Switzerland to present a poster on our forthcoming open-source research framework, ROC.

CERN is a very appropriate place for us to introduce ROC for two reasons. First, much of the research that is being done at CERN is to increase our understanding of what I would call inner space, or, the atom. When I think of outer space, I think of NASA; when I think of inner space, I think of CERN. Much of our work as a company is to understand and model the fundamental unit of research: the case.

The second reason is that CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, proposed to develop a system that would use hypertext as “a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.”¹ Kind of a cool idea, isn’t it?

While their original idea included linking web pages together using hypertext (which is what we are used to thinking of when we think of the Web, and is probably how you ended up here reading this post), it was not limited to this. Their original idea extended to linking pieces of data together. In a way, what we are doing takes it a step further, linking the various elements of research together.

Without the contributions of these two men and thousands of others, there is no way that we could even imagine trying to accomplish what we are working on now.

Thank you, all!