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About us
Who we are, what we are doing.
Cathnet inc. is a not-for-profit association incorporated in the Austrialian Capital Territory, Australia.
Cathnet.org is the 'home' of cathnet inc. Membership of this website does not mean membership of cathnet inc.
Cathnet.org was started on 27 September 2002 by Robert Zaar and Ralph Frank.
Robert had completed some research into 'Automatically Concept Mapping the Catechism' as part of a Master's of Education (research) (ACU). After this initial research he discovered that it is possible to concept map the catechism, but that it is beyond a Masters of Education (research). His supervisor suggested zope as a developmental tool. As he tried to contact various people who might be interested in the project, he discovered Ralph Frank had similar ideas and wanted to use plone, a zope add on and so cathnet.org was born to champion the ideas of the Semantic web and to be of service to the Catholic Church to create powerful websites for the new evangelisation.
We are a service. We have created this website and others out of our love of God, our desire to spread the gospel and serve the Church. We do this in our spare time and most of our work is free.
We want to help others realise their vision. cathnet.org is a place for catholic developers to be able to contribute to build new technologies to further the gospel. auscath.info is a site where non-IT people can turn their ideas into reality. It is quite easy to join auscath.info and create a new website. After less than an hour of tuition, my parish priest, Fr. Tien, was able to create a website for his vietnamese books. He needed a multipage document type, one which I thought we didn't have, but Ralph had already loaded onto the system. Since the technology we use is multi-lingual, the site actions were in vietnamese for him already. He is very happy with his site. It is this kind of leaverage and synergy that makes our technology very useable.
Andrew Mitchell is an invaluable member of our team who provides us with linux and python support. He keeps our server going and up to date.
Since we ride the wave of opensource development, particularly in the plone community, we can offer very powerful websites with features that are at the cutting edge of development. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. Most of what we do is to only configure many powerful products that are freely available. Plone rocks.
The opensource community which is very active and very large is very much akin to catholic social teaching, yet there is so little of a connection there. For instance on sourceforge one of the largest opensource repositories on the web, there are about 1.5 million users and over 140,000 free software projects. If you type in 'Catholic' you will see we are one of 6 other catholic projects. There is a huge potential for a powerful cooperation between the opensource community and the Catholic Church. We hope to help make the links.
This site and others are part of a wider vision and horizon. Some of that vision is expressed in what we call the Catholic Semantic web, which will be made up of components such as Catechism XML, Catechism RDF, Catholic XML. auscath.info is the foundational hub of sites that will be able to use Catholic XML. Plone, the technology that we use has many XML tools that will make these sites ready to operate using Catholic XML. We hope to integrate Catechism XML, and ultimately Catechism RDF into our sites and make it available for the world.
We are still in development, at the time of writing, but we hope to formally launch our services soon. We are already providing hosting for a number of Catholic organisations and Catholic initiatives.
Cathnet.org is the 'home' of cathnet inc. Membership of this website does not mean membership of cathnet inc.
Cathnet.org was started on 27 September 2002 by Robert Zaar and Ralph Frank.
Robert had completed some research into 'Automatically Concept Mapping the Catechism' as part of a Master's of Education (research) (ACU). After this initial research he discovered that it is possible to concept map the catechism, but that it is beyond a Masters of Education (research). His supervisor suggested zope as a developmental tool. As he tried to contact various people who might be interested in the project, he discovered Ralph Frank had similar ideas and wanted to use plone, a zope add on and so cathnet.org was born to champion the ideas of the Semantic web and to be of service to the Catholic Church to create powerful websites for the new evangelisation.
We are a service. We have created this website and others out of our love of God, our desire to spread the gospel and serve the Church. We do this in our spare time and most of our work is free.
We want to help others realise their vision. cathnet.org is a place for catholic developers to be able to contribute to build new technologies to further the gospel. auscath.info is a site where non-IT people can turn their ideas into reality. It is quite easy to join auscath.info and create a new website. After less than an hour of tuition, my parish priest, Fr. Tien, was able to create a website for his vietnamese books. He needed a multipage document type, one which I thought we didn't have, but Ralph had already loaded onto the system. Since the technology we use is multi-lingual, the site actions were in vietnamese for him already. He is very happy with his site. It is this kind of leaverage and synergy that makes our technology very useable.
Andrew Mitchell is an invaluable member of our team who provides us with linux and python support. He keeps our server going and up to date.
Since we ride the wave of opensource development, particularly in the plone community, we can offer very powerful websites with features that are at the cutting edge of development. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. Most of what we do is to only configure many powerful products that are freely available. Plone rocks.
The opensource community which is very active and very large is very much akin to catholic social teaching, yet there is so little of a connection there. For instance on sourceforge one of the largest opensource repositories on the web, there are about 1.5 million users and over 140,000 free software projects. If you type in 'Catholic' you will see we are one of 6 other catholic projects. There is a huge potential for a powerful cooperation between the opensource community and the Catholic Church. We hope to help make the links.
This site and others are part of a wider vision and horizon. Some of that vision is expressed in what we call the Catholic Semantic web, which will be made up of components such as Catechism XML, Catechism RDF, Catholic XML. auscath.info is the foundational hub of sites that will be able to use Catholic XML. Plone, the technology that we use has many XML tools that will make these sites ready to operate using Catholic XML. We hope to integrate Catechism XML, and ultimately Catechism RDF into our sites and make it available for the world.
We are still in development, at the time of writing, but we hope to formally launch our services soon. We are already providing hosting for a number of Catholic organisations and Catholic initiatives.
