Outercurve Research Accelerators Gallery: Open Source Scientific Software (Archive)

The Research Accelerators Gallery was one of four project galleries at the Outercurve Foundation, a Microsoft-founded nonprofit that hosted open source projects until 2017. It focused on research software, and its best-documented project is ChronoZoom, an interactive timeline of history released as open source in March 2012.

What Was the Outercurve Research Accelerators Gallery?

The Outercurve Research Accelerators Gallery was the part of the Outercurve Foundation that housed open source software for scientific research. According to Wikipedia's entry on the foundation, the foundation organized its projects into four galleries: the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, Research Accelerators, the Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability Gallery, and the Innovators Gallery.

A gallery worked as a home for related projects. Each project kept its own team and code, while the foundation supplied a neutral legal and organizational structure. The foundation itself began on September 10, 2009 as the CodePlex Foundation and took the Outercurve name in September 2010. The path that led there is told in the story of the move from CodePlex to Outercurve.

Research Accelerators was the one gallery in that list aimed at researchers rather than application developers. Its name describes the goal: software that shortens the distance between a research idea and a working tool.

Which Projects Did the Gallery Host?

ChronoZoom is the project that can be traced to the gallery with primary sources. The table below shows what each source confirms about it.

Project	What it was for	Responsible organizations	Where it lives today
ChronoZoom	Zoomable timeline from the Big Bang to the present	UC Berkeley (Earth and Planetary Science), Microsoft Research, Moscow State University	Public GitHub repository, Apache 2.0 license

ChronoZoom

ChronoZoom is a web-based "timeline of timelines." Geologist Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow conceived it, and UC Berkeley's Earth and Planetary Science department developed it with Microsoft Research and Moscow State University, as Wikipedia's ChronoZoom article explains.

The project moved through a short, well-dated sequence:

• 2009: Saekow, an interdisciplinary studies major, wrote a term paper on a crude zoomable timeline for Alvarez's Big History course.
• April 29, 2010: The 1.0 proof of concept, a Silverlight demo, was released at UC Berkeley's 97th Annual Faculty Research Lecture.
• 2010: The prototype was shown to Microsoft Live Labs, whose research division offered its Deep Zoom (Seadragon) software.
• March 14, 2012: The 2.0 beta appeared, rewritten in HTML5 and released as open source through Outercurve.
• 2014 and 2015: Microsoft Research supported further work in 2014; Axiell, Fontys University and the University of Amsterdam supported it in 2015.

UC Berkeley's announcement fills in the 2012 launch. ChronoZoom 2.0 ran on Microsoft Azure and HTML5. Microsoft Research committed a six-month project with 25 researchers, eight of them current or former Berkeley students. Professor Sergey Berezin and six Moscow State University students helped write the code.

Alvarez, who taught the Big History course for five years, summed up the appeal: "With ChronoZoom, you are browsing history, not digging it out piece by piece." The tool had to span roughly 50,000 years of modern human history and the universe's 13.7 billion years in one view. Wikipedia also records two honors: a 2012 Digital Education Achievement Award and a 2013 SXSW Interactive Award in the educational resource category.

The code lives in a public GitHub repository under the Apache 2.0 license. The repository lists 2,513 commits, 180 stars and 130 forks, and its README asks contributors to sign a Contributor's Agreement. It describes a Windows build using Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and NuGet package restore. For a fuller profile, read what ChronoZoom is.

Why Did Open Source Matter for Research Software?

Open source let universities and companies share research tools without any one of them owning the result. With an open license, a lab could read the code, adapt it to its own data and publish its improvements instead of depending on a closed product.

ChronoZoom shows how that worked in practice. Three institutions on two continents contributed code: UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research and Moscow State University. A shared repository with a stated license and a contributor agreement made that cooperation possible without a separate contract for every student or engineer.

Licenses differ in what they require. A permissive license such as Apache 2.0 allows reuse and modification under stated conditions, including in closed products. A copyleft license requires derivative works to carry the same terms. Anyone comparing the options can start with this license-choice walkthrough on choosing an open source license.

What Happened to the Gallery?

The gallery is gone because the foundation that hosted it dissolved: Outercurve's directors filed articles of dissolution with the Washington Secretary of State on April 22, 2017. The key dates run like this:

• September 10, 2009: founded as the CodePlex Foundation.
• September 2010: renamed the Outercurve Foundation.
• November 2010: by-laws changed and the board expanded.
• November 12, 2014: governance model changed, and NuGet, Kudu and the ASP.NET AJAX library were contributed to the .NET Foundation.
• April 22, 2017: articles of dissolution filed.

Projects followed different paths. The ASP.NET projects moved to the .NET Foundation, while ChronoZoom stayed on GitHub, where its repository still carries a MODERNIZATION_PLAN.md file. The wider story of the hosting platform that fed the foundation is in the historic impact of CodePlex.

FAQ

What was the Outercurve Research Accelerators Gallery?

It was one of four galleries of the Outercurve Foundation, dedicated to open source software for scientific research. The foundation dissolved in April 2017.

Which projects were in it?

ChronoZoom is the documented one. UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research and Moscow State University built it, and its 2.0 beta was released as open source through Outercurve on March 14, 2012.

Is ChronoZoom part of Outercurve?

No. The foundation released the 2.0 beta in March 2012, but UC Berkeley and its partners developed it. Its code now lives on GitHub.

Can I still download ChronoZoom?

Yes. The source code is public on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The repository's setup notes call for Windows Identity Foundation 3.5 and Visual Studio.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Outercurve Foundation (galleries, founding, renaming, .NET Foundation transfer, dissolution).
• Wikipedia: ChronoZoom (authors, 1.0 and 2.0 dates, later support, awards).
• UC Berkeley News, March 14, 2012: "ChronoZoom: a deep dive into the history of everything."
• ChronoZoom repository on GitHub (license, setup notes, repository statistics).