Open Source Software
Open Source software is a recent trend in software, in which the software is written collaboratively by groups of developers - some paid and some volunteer - spread throughout the world. Open Source Software has many advantages over proprietary software, which is why Fogbeam Labs bases all of it's product offerings on Open Source software.
Welcome To Fogbeam.org: Home of the Fogbeam Community
All Fogbeam Labs products are based on projects which are community-driven, open-source. We sponsor the development of several projects, all of which are 100% open-source, with most code under the Apache Software License v2 (individual components and/or libraries may be under their own licenses). Our development is not "psuedo open source" or "open source lite" in any way. Our bug database is open to the public, our code is on GitHub where anyone can fork it at anytime, and development discussions are held on public mailing lists (powered by Google Groups) where any member of the community can participate.
Our goal is to develop the most powerful and useful suite of open-source tools, applications, APIs and components for supporting the development of intelligent applications and the construction of an organizational digital nervous system and enabling the real time enterprise.
Our projects center around the areas of collaboration, social-networking, business intelligence, knowledge management and discovery, organizational learning, information retrieval and decision support.
Projects:
ScrewPile - ScrewPile is the umbrella project dedicated to collaboration, knowledge management, and information retrieval. ScrewPile encompasses
three subprojects:
- Neddick
- Neddick is an interface that builds on the APIs for tagging, ranking and recommending items, to provide a platform for sharing and discovering useful links, documents, people, etc. Think of it as a sort of cross between reddit, delicious and planet. What we have right now is pretty simplistic, but there's a LOT of room for growth in this.
- Quoddy
- Quoddy is sort of a "mini Facebook" like social-networking interface. Builds on the APIs for social-graph management, activity-stream, activity profiling, tagging, etc. Provides the front-end for managing connections and for letting users provide information about themselves, their interests, etc. But unlike Facebook, no silly Pirates vs. Ninjas or Farmville stuff
- Heceta
- Heceta is a search engine that leverages all of the various bits of information from Neddick, Quoddy, and "TBD" to provide better / deeper / more insightful search results than you can get from simple document content analysis. Intranet search in organizations is usually very poor, largely because page-rank type algorithms don't work well due to the lack of links between documents. But by supplementing the content analysis with scoring based on tags, social graph connections, activity-stream information, etc., and applying machine-learning / artificial-intelligence techniques Heceta can do a superior job of locating the knowledge and information a user needs. This is not, by the way, a totally novel idea. It's sometimes referred to as Social Search