| Type | Company Limited by Guarantee |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet, Search Technologies |
| Founded | London, UK (February 4, 2008)[1] |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
| Website | OMFICA.org |
Open Market For Internet Content Accessibility - OMFICA is a non-profit organization with the mission to develop competitive market for web search. OMFICA has created data repository of World Wide Web content and set-up its governance based on democratic principles. Data repository is updated by distributed crawlers, which use free resources of volunteers' PCs.
The World Wide Web is a huge source of information generated by people who use it. However, this data is chaotically spread or decentralized in the wide net of the web. In order the data to be available for the Web users, it should be collected and centralized in storage. Centralization itself carries a threat of monopolization of the information, and when it is monopolized, it stops to be openly available for the public. A very good remedy for this could be a centralization of the data with its democratic availability, that is the data centralized but not monopolized and it becomes available and controllable for all the Web users interested in it. This idea is carried by OMFICA.
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Being incorporated in February 2008, OMFICA starts its activities by participating in WWW important events, such as Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (April 22-25, 2008)[2], and joining to WWW Consortium (May 24, 2008)[3].
OMFICA implements a strategy to develop own or deploy third party technologies for the creation of OMFICA Data Repository, which enables to integrate data about publicly available websites’ structure, pages’ actual content, visit statistics and pages’ semantic analysis results.
Activities carried out by OMFICA could be logically separated into following subgroups:
OMFICA makes it possible for Web users, Web companies, web masters, website publishers and text analyzing service providers to get involved in creation of integrated Global World Wide Web Intelligent Data Repository.
OMFICA is governed by its members - internet users and companies. OMFICA’s activities are carried out by its four committees: Business Committee, Trustees Committee, Technical Committee, and Content Committee. Either of these committees delegates three Directors elected online from its members into a Board of Directors - OMFICA's key administrative body.