The new Open Semantic Collaboration Architecture Foundation aims at common standards in collaborative software.

The OSCA Foundation brings together organisations and individuals interested in ensuring interoperability between desktops and collaborative environments. It provides a discussion and exchange forum as well as a meeting place for different stakeholder to explore joint interests and define and execute appropriate actions, aiming to ensure the continued evolution and standardisation of an open vendor- and platform-neutral interoperable collaborative environment architecture.

We believe that an advanced collaboration and personal information management infrastructure assists humans, organisations and systems with their individual as well as collective problem solving, enabling them to create solutions to problems that were previously thought insolvable, and enabling innovation and increased productivity on individual, organisational and global levels. In fact we believe that a collaboration and information management infrastructure is critical for enabling humanity to solve the problems that we are facing today. Establishing globally valid personal information management and collaboration architecture and standards have a high priority in order to tackle today's problems together. The ideas described in this document have emerged out of large EU projects like NEPOMUK and ECOSPACE which have performed considerable research development in computer science on the new fields of semantics and collaboration. These project have brought together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop and disseminate initial solutions and ideas for enabling advanced personal information management and collaboration extending the personal information management environment into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. The OSCA foundation is aiming at:

• building a community around next generation personal information management and collaboration technologies,
• initiating and promoting standardisation and further development activities
• raising talents, sponsors and enthusiasm,
• and motivating organisational and individual participants to join.

Do not hesitate to contact us. Your ideas, comments, questions, contributions etc. are warmly welcome.