Useful, interesting, inspiring technology/software that is out there that you might not know about.

(I guess this is more like a filtered link list, but with added comments in case you don't feel like following the links to find out what it's all about.. A mix of old, but solid links and a load of tabs that I really should close ;))

1. Tahoe - http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html

   The "Tahoe" project is a distributed filesystem, which safely stores files on multiple machines to protect against hardware failures. Cryptographic tools are used to ensure integrity and confidentiality, and a decentralized architecture minimizes single points of failure. Files can be accessed through a web interface or native system calls (via FUSE). Fine-grained sharing allows individual files or directories to be delegated by passing short URI-like strings through email. Tahoe grids are easy to set up, and can be used by a handful of friends or by a large company for thousands of customers.

2. CouchDB - http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/

   Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

   CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.

3. Yahoo Term Extractor - http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html

   The Term Extraction Web Service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content.

4. Kea term extractor (SKOS enabled) - http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/

   KEA is an algorithm for extracting keyphrases from text documents. It can be either used for free indexing or for indexing with a controlled vocabulary.

5. Piwik - http://piwik.org/

   piwik is an open source (GPL license) web analytics software. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… and so much more. piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

6. RabbitMQ - http://www.rabbitmq.com/

   RabbitMQ is an Open (Mozilla licenced) implementation of AMQP, the emerging standard for high performance enterprise messaging. Built on top of the Open Telecom Platform (OTP). OTP is used by multiple telecommunications companies to manage switching exchanges for voice calls, VoIP and now video. These systems are designed to never go down and to handle truly vast user loads. And because the systems cannot be taken offline, they have to be very flexible, for instance it must be possible to 'hot deploy' features and fixes on the fly whilst managing a consistent user SLA.

7. Talis Platform - http://n2.talis.com/wiki/Main_Page

   The Talis Platform provides solid infrastructure for building Semantic Web applications. Delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), it dramatically reduces the complexity and cost of storing, indexing, searching and augmenting data. It enables applications to be brought to market rapidly with a smaller initial investment. Developers using the Platform can spend more of their time building extraordinary applications and less of their time worrying about how they will scale their data storage.

8. The Fascinator - http://ice.usq.edu.au/projects/fascinator/trac

   The goal of the project is to create a simple interface to Fedora that uses a single technology – that’s Solr – to handle all browsing, searching and security. This contrasts with solutions that use RDF for browsing by ‘collection’, XACML for security and a text indexer for fulltext search, and in some cases relational database tables as well. We wanted to see if taking out some of these layers makes for a fast application which is easy to configure. So far so good.

9. RDFQuery - http://code.google.com/p/rdfquery/

   This project is for plugins for jQuery that enable you to generate and manipulate RDF within web pages [in javascript]. There are two main aims of this project: 1) to provide a way of querying and manipulating RDF triples within Javascript that is as intuitive as jQuery is for querying and manipulating a DOM, and 2) to provide a way of gleaning RDF from elements within a web page, whether that RDF is represented as RDFa or with a microformat.

10. eXist - http://exist.sourceforge.net/
    

    eXist-db is an open source database management system entirely built on XML technology. It stores XML data according to the XML data model and features efficient, index-based XQuery processing. It supports:
    

    • XQuery 1.0 / XPath 2.0
    • XSLT 1.0 (using Apache Xalan) or XSLT 2.0 (optional using Saxon)
    • HTTP interfaces: REST, WebDAV, SOAP, XMLRPC, Atom Publishing Protocol
    • XML database specific: XMLDB, XQJ/JSR-225 (under development), XUpdate, XQuery update extensions (to be aligned with the new XQuery Update Facility 1.0

11. Evergreen - http://evergreen-ils.org/

    Evergreen is an enterprise-class [Open Source] library automation system
    that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries
    manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or
    complex the libraries.

12. Apache Solr - http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
    

    Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the
    Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs,
    hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features.

13. GATE - http://gate.ac.uk/

    GATE is a leading toolkit for text-mining. It bills itself as "the Eclipse of Natural Language Engineering,
    the Lucene of Information Extraction" [NB I have yet to use this, but it has the kind of provenance and userbase that makes me feel okay about sharing this link]
    

14. Ubuntu JeOS - http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos
    

    Ubuntu Server Edition JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant
    of our server operating system, configured specifically for virtual
    appliances. Currently available as a CD-Rom ISO for download, JeOS is a
    specialised installation of Ubuntu Server Edition with a tuned kernel
    that only contains the base elements needed to run within a virtualized
    environment.
    

15. Synergy2 - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
    

    Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between
    multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its
    own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users
    with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its
    own monitor(s).