== Mission and Goals ==

Topaz is a nonprofit organization of focused on developing open source software
around collaborative creation, management and sharing of information.

Our goals are to:

    * Develop software framework to allow easy and rapid development of data
      driven applications
    * Facilitate research and collaboration of data/content models in various
      knowledge fields
    * Enable users to develop innovative ways to explore, use and share data

The major software projects actively being worked on are:

 * [wiki:Topaz Topaz] platform
 * [wiki:Ambra Ambra] publishing system

Please also see the [wiki:FAQ FAQ].

== Topaz Recent News ==


 * Topaz & Ambra 0.9.2 final has been released - [wiki:News#april8_2009 April 8, 2009]
 * Topaz & Ambra 0.9.1 final has been released - [wiki:News#feb25_2009 Febraury 25, 2009]
 * Topaz & Ambra 0.9.1-rc1 has been released - [wiki:News#jan29_2009 January 29, 2009]
 * Topaz & Ambra 0.9 has been released - [wiki:News#sept1_2008 September 1, 2008]
 * We have changed the license in subversion to Apache 2.0 - [wiki:News#april5_2008 April 5, 2008]
 * [wiki:News All news]

== New users to Trac Wiki ==

 * WikiFormatting -- Wiki Formatting Rules
 * TracGuide --  Built-in Documentation
 * [wiki:SandBox Play in SandBox to test Wiki commands]

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.

== Organization Status ==

Topaz is a tax-exempt, 501(c)3, nonprofit corporation headquartered in San
Francisco, California. Topaz is governed by a Board of Directors chaired by
PLoS co-founder [http://mcb.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_mcbfaculty&name=eisenm Michael B. Eisen].

Topaz received a its start-up grant from the [http://www.moore.org/ Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation]
and support from
[http://www.plos.org/ PLoS], [http://www.osafoundation.org/ Open Source Application Foundation],
[http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ Software Freedom Law Center], [http://creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons],
[http://sciencecommons.org/ Science Commons], [http://www.fedoracommons.org/ Fedora Commons],
[http://www.mulgara.org/ Mulgara], and many other
foundations, universities, organizations and individuals.