MIDAS Goes Open Source

Kitware is proud to announce that MIDAS is now available under a non-restrictive (BSD) open-source license. For the past year, MIDAS has been generating a lot of interest from the research community and we believe that opening its source code will lead to a better archiving and processing system. Starting with the new MIDAS release (2.4), MIDAS will be an open-source toolkit. We encourage users and developers to subscribe to the mailing list and report bugs and features requests.

MIDAS is a digital archiving and dissemination system written in PHP with a PostgreSQL backend. MIDAS is an extensible platform that allows developers to extend its functionality via plug-ins. The MIDAS framework combines a web front end with a database and supports media-filters for upload depending on the data type. For instance, a filter has been written to extract the relevant keywords in a PDF. The keywords are stored in the database and are easily searchable. Furthermore, Kitware is actively developing a C++ API to retrieve, search and upload datasets to MIDAS. The C++ API will be released, open source, in the next few months.