The OpenIsis society was founded in October 2002 to further the
development and dissemination of open source information systems.
We support libraries, archives and other public organizations
like social movements to manage and retrieve information in a
high quality way according to bibliographical principles.


Most important is the
>	OpenIsis
database system which was developed by our members since May 2001.
OpenIsis is the open source member of the
>	IsisIntro	CDS/ISIS
>	CdsIsis	software family.


*	who needs quality information systems?

Well ... everybody who has quality information.
Traditional examples are libraries, where librarians invest much
knowledge and experience to make you find the book you need.
While the large libraries have a long track of using and developing
bibliographic databases, many organizations like worker's unions,
charity organizations and social movements have smaller archives
of their publications, which ought to be as well accessible.


Even for the purely virtual web-archives, newsgroups and mailing lists,
it is increasingly understood, that the power of search engines needs
to be augmented by quality metadata to be retrieved reliably.
Dublin Core and the Resource Description Framework are examples
of such approaches based on bibliographical principles.


*	who needs open source information systems?

Many individuals, organizations and institutions can't afford
the commercial bibliographic database systems,
where even small site licenses start at about 10.000 US$.
Therefore,
>	http://www.unesco.org/webworld/isis/	UNESCO's CDS/ISIS
, which is available for a nominal fee, is in widespread use,
where the budgets are low.


Our
>	http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html	free software
is not only free of charge, but also free of restrictions.
It enables the users to build on it, to improve it,
to adopt it to their needs rather than being dependent
on the original developers.
To close the "digital gap", access to *both* the content
and the software is needed.


*	what about the "Information Society"?

Even the techies and librarians at rather well-equiped universities
in the US or Europe, which are working on new ways to publish
and manage free content, like the
>	http://www.openarchives.org/	Open Archives Initiative
or the
>	http://oc4s.org/	Open Community for Science
, do not have access to the code of existing commercial systems.
Following the Linux Economy, we may find that open source
is the basis for progress ...



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