Outercurve Foundation Adds ChonoZoom to Research Accelerators Library

  • By Mike Hohenbrink
  • 03/19/12

The Outercurve Foundation has accepted the ChronoZoom big history project, an open source effort designed to make historical connections easier to grasp, after the project was offered to the foundation by the University of California, Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research.

Big history is an interdisciplinary field of study that looks for themes and patterns throughout the history of the universe. The project is designed to help big historians understand historical themes in the sciences and humanities by using a cloud-based timeline function that utilizes HTML5.

"Up until now, it's been very difficult to understand the vastly different timescales of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity," said Roland Saekow, ChronoZoom community project lead, University of California, Berkeley. "With ChronoZoom's unique zoom capability, we can seamlessly zoom from billions of years, down to a single day right in a standard Web browser."

The non-profit Outercurve Foundation has accepted the project, which is currently available in version 2, into its Research Accelerators Gallery.

The gallery, sponsored by Microsoft Research, features various technologies and open source tools designed to support academic researchers as well as those engaged in scientific research, according to the foundation's Web site.

ChronoZoom is designed to make chronological relationships more apparent and provide a framework for specialized electronic resources by linking those resources to fixed time scales in a way that's organized and logical.

A demo of the project was recently given at the technology education conference held in Seattle, WA under the auspices of the Northwest Council for Computer Education.

"The assignment of ChronoZoom to the Outercurve Foundation will allow this important project to flourish," said Paula Hunter, executive director of the Outercurve Foundation. "ChronoZoom provides a step toward sharing and analyzing historical data to overcome the challenges of visualizing Big History. We are pleased to work with Microsoft Research, the University of California at Berkeley and Moscow State University to continue to foster improvements in the development of this project."

More information about the ChronoZoom project is available at chronozoomproject.org.

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