Open Source Software “Urchin” Released

NeoReality completes production of open source project for Nature, funded under UK government grant.

FORT MYERS, FL — Today NeoReality and Nature released the first public version of Urchin, an open source, web-based, RSS feed aggregation and filtering system.

Urchin can read the syndication data of news web sites from around the world, retain this data in a database, and then allow queries to be run against the data to produce custom news feeds. Any organization that publishes or processes news could use Urchin, and there is no fee to download and use the program.

Urchin was conceived and architected by Timo Hannay and Ben Lund of the Nature Publishing Group, with database design from Nicole Tindill. NeoReality provided the programming services necessary to produce the software against a grant budget and timeline from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee as one of the PALS Metadata and Interoperability Projects. Urchin is referred to as ROSA on the JISC web site, an early working name.

In an email to NeoReality, Dr. Hannay, who directs the Nature New Technology Team, shared felicitations with “Many thanks - and congratulations - on the release of Urchin. You did an amazing job.”

Urchin has a home page at SourceForge, a popular open source repository. Regarding copyright license, some parts of Urchin are released under the GPL and some parts under the LGPL. Open source software is software that comes with the source code instructions, and can be freely modified, and can usually be redistributed for free under certain conditions.

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