IdSpace was presented at TMRA 2009. It is a research project funded by the European Commission, in which a platform for distributed collaborative product innovation is being developed. In short, people at different locations should be able to meet online to solve problems by sketching and evaluating ideas together.

In January 2010 the IdSpace project and Topic Maps Lab are working together to perform a user evaluation test of the IdSpace platform. Members of the TMRA news list have been invited to participate in a complete project session. On January 5th people from five countries will login to the platform to have a creativity session. All real-time and collaboratively. The objective is to get end-user feedback on the platform and to discover any final bugs. During the session the participants will collaborate in naming mottos that are related to topic maps and will think about the interests of TMRA visitors. The end result will be a suggestion for the motto of the TMRA 2010 conference.

The IdSpace project relies heavily on topic maps for the storage of, and linking between, ideas. Topic maps provide a clear and intuitive model that represents the way people naturally think. Topic maps are also used as the basis of a reasoning engine that can suggest new links between ideas. By analysing the semantic data in the topic map the software is capable of finding new associations, that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. At the end of the project (April 2010) the platform will be open-sourced. Find out more about IdSpace here.