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Starting on Monday 24 August 2009, the visitors of OSOR.EU, the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations, can search for applications among the 1749 open source development projects that are currently hosted on ten development websites provided by national and regional public administrations in Austria, France, Italy and Spain.

The search results are based on automatic translations of the project descriptions provided on these ten forges, using the European Commission's machine translation service. The search tool is an improvement of the current search plugin offered by OSOR.EU.

"All of these ten forges use the same platform to host the software development projects, G-Force. That, and the cooperation of the forges themselves, made it relatively simple to access all of the projects", explains Unisys consultant Marco Battistoni, involved in the development of the OSOR.EU website.

The search engine is meant to make it easier for visitors to the OSOR.EU website to get introduced to projects developed on other forges. Once a link is selected, visitors will be taken to the national forge.

Search-widget

OSOR.EU will also be offering this federated search service in the form of a widget that can be embedded into other websites. "This is a simple Javascript application and some CSS code, so other sites can easily customise it to fit their own needs and adapt it to the lay out of their web site", explains Battistoni.

The search engine is the most recent feature that extends the OSOR.EU. This platform is meant for the exchange of information, experiences of free and open source based code for use in public administrations. The OSOR repository provides tools enabling public administrations and developers to collaborate with each other in developing new open source applications.