I just returned from EDUCAUSE where I met with several people from Xythos. Xythos has just announced Developer at Xythos – a collaboration web site aimed at helping users do creative things with the Xythos software. Kevin Wiggen, the CTO for Xythos, also announced a new initiative to spawn open source development around the Xythos API.

From Kevin’s blog,

>Today I have donated some code and examples to this site. While none of it should be considered production level code, I believe it’s a good starting ground for a number of possible projects that can be worked on here.
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a) Xythos and Eclipse — setup guide for running Xythos and the default shipping Tomcat within Eclipse (great for debugging).
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b) Xythos and Konfabulator — A JavaScript library that can access Xythos (Upload, directory listing, move, copy, etc). I can only imaging the widgets that can be created, here hopefully is the first step, the layer to talk to the storage web service.
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c) Xythos Pictures — A small Servlet that generates thumnails and picture albulms from uploaded pictures. The most interesting part to me is that picture name and description are stored as meta-data. If you don’t like the way the album looks, create your own. The meta-data is there for you to work with. It’s stored with the Object and NOT in the application!!!!

Kevin and I had a long conversation (and Xythos asked me to present) discussing the role of Folksonomies in Enterprise Information management.

I am very excited by the news that Xythos is starting up this open source resource for Xythos development. I have high hopes that this effort will really drive the vision and expand the options for using Xythos’s products in creative ways within the Enterprise. I hope that tagging and social “browsing and mining” (similar to Jon Udell’s work on Collaborative Filtering) will find its way into the product through open source efforts and product development. I know that Ed Miller (CEO and President of Xythos), Kevin and others at the company get the idea and see the power of tagging and social networking.

As Ed said during our meetings, “Xythos is infrastructure not an application… What we want to do with this site is demonstrate that Xythos is a powerful piece of infrastructure that can enable a variety of applications.”

Kudos to Xythos and I look forward to watching and participating in this effort.

– Jim