Welcome to OMII-UK

OMII-UK is an open-source organisation that empowers the UK research community by providing software for use in all disciplines of research. All of OMII-UK's software is free, open source and fully supported.

We help new users to get started with e-Research, we provide the software that is needed, and if the software does not exist, we can fund developers to create it. We also help to guide the development of e-Research by liaising with national and international organisations, e-Research groups, standards' groups and - of course - the e-Researchers themselves.

We are funded by various groups, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

If you would like to learn more about what OMII-UK can do for you, please view this presentation.

Software

OMII-UK's software covers a wide range of e-Research functionality. We cover everything from management of data and information, vidoeconferencing and the execution of workflows and jobs. We also provide the infrastructure on which other software can be based.

A short description of each software package and what it can do is provided in the software overview page.

All of our software can be downloaded from our download page.

Support

OMII-UK provides comprehensive support for all of our software. We can also help with questions about starting with e-Research. Our support is provided via email or by submitting an enquiry to our helpdesk.

Funding

OMII-UK identifies gaps in the provision of e-Research software and commissions developers to produce software accordingly. A budget of around £2.5M was provided for commissioning the development of software. Projects are not limited to the development of software services or tools, but could include improving the quality of current software or the integration of OMII-UK tools and services into other applications. See the obtaining funding page for details.

History

OMII-UK started life in January 2004 as the 'Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute' based at the University of Southampton. Within two years, an engineered and tested software distribution had been established, which was based on commissioned software from within the open-source community.

In January 2006, OMII-UK was formed when the Southampton group was joined by the myGrid team, based in Manchester, and the OGSA-DAI team, based in Edinburgh. The new groups formed OMII-UK into a national organisation, and brought with them their own established and highly successful software: Taverna and OGSA-DAI.