Outercurve Foundation Announces Contribution of .Net Bio Project

WAKEFIELD, Mass., Oct. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Outercurve Foundation today announced the acceptance of the .Net Bio project into the Research Accelerators Gallery. .Net Bio, a language-neutral, reusable .NET library and API that supports the development of applications for bioinformatics research, is the fourth project contributed to the gallery. The open source project, which has the support of bioinformatics researchers from a number of educational institutions, was contributed by Microsoft, the foundation's primary sponsor.

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The Research Accelerators Gallery hosts open source projects that support the development of tools and technologies used by academic researchers and scientists. Working within the gallery, .Net Bio contributors will be able to increase the project's focus on improving community development practices to broaden the capabilities and usefulness of .Net Bio to the life sciences community.

"The .Net Bio project shows the power of community and collaboration in the scientific and research communities," said Paula Hunter, Executive Director, Outercurve Foundation. "The contribution of such a significant and far-reaching project will help researchers expand participation in planned development engagements within the USA, Brazil, Colombia, and Australia. .Net Bio will enable researchers to share data and development methodologies to support a range of life sciences research projects."

.Net Bio, formerly known as the Microsoft Biology Foundation, is a bioinformatics toolkit that includes a library of commonly-used bioinformatics functions. The .Net Bio project's V1 release, completed in summer 2011, facilitates collaboration and accelerates scientific research by enabling different data sets to communicate. Several universities and corporations use .Net Bio tools to reduce processing time and enable scientists to focus on research. Project committers come from Cornell University, the University of Queensland, Johnson & Johnson, Illumina and Microsoft.

"As part of the Outercurve Foundation, .Net Bio project committers will have the resources and community participation to support more complex and very large plant genomes by working with universities and consortia around the world," said Tony Hey, Outercurve Board member and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections. The project brings a strong history of consistent and dedicated community management to the Outercurve Foundation."

The Outercurve Foundation has three galleries and 17 projects. Galleries include the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, the Research Accelerators Gallery and the Data, Language and System Interoperability (DLSI) Gallery.

For more information on the .Net Bio project, the Research Accelerators Gallery or the Outercurve Foundation please visit www.Outercurve.org.

About The Outercurve Foundation

The Outercurve Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation providing software IP management and project development governance to enable and encourage organizations to develop software collaboratively in open source communities for faster results.  The Outercurve Foundation is the only open source foundation that is platform, technology, and license agnostic. For more information about the Outercurve Foundation contact [email protected].

SOURCE Outercurve Foundation