rVooz is an Open and collaborative project designed to make dynamic connections between people who with shared context whether geo-spatial, structural, or other forms. rVooz is a software suite being built to make contextual connections, or “contextions,” between people who may or may not have a priori knowledge of each other. It idea is to bring people together even if they don’t have each other in their buddy lists or know each other’s phone numbers.

The rVooz suite consists of software clients that post context; a Gateway service which receives context and feeds Matching Engines; and Voozers that coordinate the connections (or contextions as we call ‘em) by distributing presence or starting sessions. A bit more detail…

• The Gateway service accepts registrations via its REST interface, and feeds context “jobs” to pluggable matchers. The Gateway also consumes contextions produced by Matching Engines.

• Matching Engines do the real work in the rVooz system. Currently we are working on a Geo-based matcher that can figure out the closest person to your location, and a string-based matcher that can compare just about anything.

• Voozers utilize rVooz contextions to distribute temporally dynamic presence and/or initiate collaborative sessions (chat and voice). The current working example is using Jabber(OpenFire) and instant messaging as the rVooz link.

• Clients are anything that can produce a context-user registration to the Gateway service. We are currently focusing on using a web-browser/web-app to allow users to register a context but there are no limitations; any application can post to the context API.

The project is founded on Open Source licensing: Apache License, Version 2.0 and most of the code, including the Salient Server, will be released under that license. In some cases, specific components will be released under different licenses because of integration requirements. For example, the OpenFire Voozer is licensed under the GPLv2.0 in order to comply with the OpenFire license.