The Outercurve Foundation Congratulates Open Source 'Big History' Tool for Being Recognized as the Leading Educational App Technology

BOSTON, Mar. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- ChronoZoom, an open source project supported by the Outercurve Foundation, today announced that it has received the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Award for Educational Resource. The SXSW Interactive Awards recognize the years' best new digital work and celebrates technologists who are building tomorrow's interactive trends. The award has been granted for the past 16 years, and is among the technology industry's most prestigious honors.

Microsoft Research (MSR), the University of California Berkeley, and Moscow University created ChronoZoom to help uncover the crosscurrents of history that exist among disparate data sets – a capability that makes it easier to study "Big History." ChronoZoom displays these insights on a timeline that reveals interrelations throughout geography, culture and history, as well as across multiple disciplines of academic research.

"The ChronoZoom team exemplifies the best of collaborative research and open source software development," said Outercurve Foundation president Paula Hunter. "This award is just the beginning of exciting growth for the ChronoZoom team, and we look forward to their continued success as they attract new contributors around the world, and allow us to explore new content and history."

The Outercurve Foundation also wishes to thank the SXSW Interactive Awards for recognizing ChronoZoom as best of category in Educational Resource. ChronoZoom was selected as the winner out of five finalists that were also under consideration for the honor. ChronoZoom became an Outercurve project in March 2012, and resides in the foundation's Research Accelerators Gallery.

Educational application developers can use ChronoZoom to break through the barriers between the humanities and science, making it a truly disruptive open technology for researchers and students alike. The application is cloud-based, utilizes HTML5 and JavaScript code, and is available under the Apache 2.0 software license.

About The Outercurve Foundation
The Outercurve Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. For more information on the DataUp project, the Research Accelerators Gallery or the Outercurve Foundation, please visit: http://www.Outercurve.org.

About ChronoZoom
ChronoZoom is focused on providing a dynamic, interactive cloud based data visualization tool for Big History. When completed, this project will be online and freely available to anyone interested in using it as an educator, a student and/or a researcher. The vision is to enable innovative ways of teaching Big History and empower interdisciplinary research. Project site: http://www.outercurve.org/Galleries/ResearchAccelerators/ChronoZoom

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SOURCE Outercurve Foundation