The Infrastructure Software Development and Architecture (ISDA) group at MIT IS&T's (Information Services and Technology) is working on a software project called Thalia. Thalia is one of the key initiatives underway by the ISDA. Here's a description of Thalia from AIIM Expo Presentation - Web 2.0 and Next Generation ECM by John Newton, Chief Technology Officer of Alfresco, and Wilson D'Souza of MIT:

Thalia is MIT’s enterprise “Flickr�being developed for managing images and media (e.g. print, web, lecture presentations, online exhibitions.) Key to Thalia’s approach is tagging of media with customizable, user-defined metadata (tags, discussion comments etc).

Thalia's rich UI is developed with OpenLaszlo. This screenshot of Thalia is taken from John Newton's and Wilson D'Souza's presentation:

Thalia currently has a rich web-based UI that uses Flash through Open Laszlo, an Image Management Engine and a REST-like web interface, and an OSID that allows external applications to search Thalia data. This project would increase Thalia's scalability so that multiple repositories can be supported within the same server, limited UI customization per repository is available, file storage efficiency is improved to handle large numbers of images, and redundancy and reasonably rapid recovery in case of system failure is provided; as well as its functionality by enabling access control via MIT's authorization system and not just individuals and supporting user ordering of images in albums for use in slide shows and presentations. read more

According to the Stellar blog, Thalia will integrate with Stellar, MIT's Course Management System.

Stellar Images will soon integrate with Thalia, an enterprise image management tool developed by the ISDA group with MIT's IS&T department. Together they will offer Stellar class and project sites the functionality to organize, display, and compare images in a way similar to that of Flickr.

Thalia is not the first OpenLaszlo application at the MIT we know of. Three MIT students have been building Kagome, a web application that allowed users to design simple user interfaces by creating and manipulating directed graphs.

Doesn't that call for an OpenLaszlo event at the MIT? With part of the OpenLaszlo team working from out of Boston it shouldn't be to difficult to set up an OpenLaszlo event there. Henry, we need your help!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under General, Sightings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.