Publishing Company Launches Scholarly Site

 Is WordPress set to have some competition? According to a recent New York Times post, Omeka the open-source publishing platform has announced the launch of a hosted Web service, known as Omeka.net.

Reports show that while this service is similar to content management systems provided by WordPress, Omeka is actually more geared toward the online exhibition of library, museum and archive collections.

In this sense, Omeka is actually more focused on helping to bring academic scholarship and cultural heritage sites to the Internet. When scholars and archivists use Omeka.net, they will be able to easily build digital exhibits and publish digital scholarship. At the same time, they can take advantage of Web 2.0 tools that are known to foster collaboration and communication.

A variety of content can be found on Omeka, including images, audio, video, text, etc., all of which can be marked with Dublin Core metadata.

With this new hosted service, five different plans are offered to users and different features and pricing options are based on the number of plugins, sites, storage etc. This flexibility enables Omeka to appeal to be institutional and individual users.

The Omeka project is supported by a strong open source development and user community. Omeka.net is developed in part by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Omeka is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

In other open source news, TMCnet recently reported that the OpenNebula Toolkitwas recently released by OpenNebula Project, which was developed based on the extensive research, as well as feedback, from leading IT organizations who are leveraging OpenNebula to build large-scale production infrastructures in both industry and academia.

Razorleaf announced the introduction of an open source SharePoint-based solution which was developed in collaboration with Actify, Aras and Microsoft (News - Alert). The product development solution helps product data assets, which are normally constrained within a product lifecycle management or product data management system to be shared throughout the enterprise and also with its customers, suppliers and global partners, improving collaboration and cycle times by fostering speed to decision.