[CONSENSUS IST 2001 32407]:Announcement of Open Source Software a vailability

Dear Members of the DI working group,

the Consensus Consortium is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Source Implementation of its Adaptation Engine supporting the Renderer-Independent Markup Language (RIML) 2.0.

Please find the text of the official announcement below:

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CONSENSUS project announces open source software for device-independent authoring

The European Commission-funded CONSENSUS project has reached a successful conclusion, producing a specification for a Renderer-Independent Markup Language (RIML) for third generation (3G) mobile communications applications. The CONSENSUS project was initiated to address the multiple efforts associated with adapting user-interfaces of a given application to be operated on a variety of (mobile) devices. RIML allows an author to write content only once in a standardised format based on the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) and XFORMS. The content is then automatically adapted for different end-user terminals including voice.

CONSENSUS has implemented a prototype application platform, which supports mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), phones with wireless application protocol (WAP) and XHTML-Mobile Profile (MP) browsers, and pure voice-operated devices. The prototype has now been released as Open Source under the Common Public License, and it is available via the CONSENSUS website http://www.consensus-online.org

The objective of the CONSENSUS project was to enable the efficient development of corporate web applications in 3G mobile networks by removing the need to adapt applications manually for different device types. The first step was to create a device-independent authoring language that would be acceptable to developers but still contains sufficient functionality to support adaptation. The result was RIML, familiar-looking for web authors since it is based on XHTML2.0 and XFORMS, but with additional features such as content selection and alternative layouts to support single authoring. The second step was the implementation of a reverse proxy prototype that supported the use of RIML with no installation required on the client (user) side. Finally, CONSENSUS validated RIML and the prototype architecture in a field trial with real users using a real corporate application.

The CONSENSUS Open Source Software is hosted here: 

http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/consensus/index.html 

About CONSENSUS:

CONSENSUS (3G Mobile Context Sensitive Adaptability - User Friendly Mobile Work Place for Seamless Enterprise Applications) is a research project in the Information Society Technologies programme of the European Commission Fifth Framework Programme for research and technological development (www.consensus-online.org)

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IST-Programme / KA4 / AL: IST-2001-4.3.2. The project CONSENSUS is supported by the European Community. This document does not represent the opinion of the European Community. It is also the sole responsibility of the author and not the responsibility of the European Community using any data that might appear therein.
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On behalf of the Consensus Consortium,
						Thomas Ziegert

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Dr. Thomas Ziegert          phone: +49 721 6902-61
Corporate Research         mobile: +49 171 3363734
SAP AG CEC Karlsruhe          fax: +49 6227 78-40408 
Vincenz-Prießnitz-Str. 1   mailto: thomas.ziegert@sap.com
76131 Karlsruhe

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 04:58:13 UTC