We are a long-established team of software development experts based in Sheffield, UK. Our clients and collaborators are spread throughout the world and we look forward to working with an increasingly diverse group of friends during the next 20 years of our development.
To learn more about our history and ethos please read on. Or, for more about the people involved, you could take a look at our team, partners and alumni pages.
Our expertise
Our software products have a focus on the publishing, aggregating, storing and retrieving of information and are widely used by libraries, museums and educational organisations. As a result, we have become widely regarded as experts in these sectors. Collectively we can count over 100 years of experience working with institutions to give access to resources using the latest tools and technologies.
A history of collaboration
We see our involvement in developer communities as being integral to our work and regularly attend conferences, meetings, consultations, hack days, etc. to share our knowledge and experience. Our open and collaborative approach has naturally led us to work with like minded (and sometimes unlike minded!) organisations on research and development activities. At a national level we have worked on projects with Jisc, Nesta, the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK), and at an international level we have taken part in European Union funded programmes and frameworks. Details of some of these projects are available in our portfolio.
One outcome of this sort of collaboration was the setting up of the Vocabulary Management Group (Vocman) with Schemeta in 2005. We managed the company jointly until 2012, when we merged development and support of products in this area into our mainstream activity. Then in 2015, we acquired the rights to Psydev Ltd’s IMS Learning Information Services Tools, which we continue to develop and support. For more about the former Vocman and Psydev products please see our products section.
Our collaborations don’t just centre on research and development. We often partner on projects with other trusted experts with complementary skill sets, either as lead contractor or subcontractor, depending on the needs of the customer. Over the years we have built an extensive network of contacts and collaborators which enables us to bid for, and win, work that would otherwise be outside the scope of a company of our size. See our partners page for more details.
Commitment to open source
When Knowledge Integration was founded in 1999 our focus was very much on the development and support of pure java, open source, toolkits for the implementation of library sector protocols. In particular Z39.50, with KI Discover (previously JZKit) and ISO 10161 with KI Share (previously OpenRequest). These toolkits are still widely used today, both as open source software and by library sector vendors under a commercial license.
From the outset, we have been keen advocates of open source licensing for software, with the majority of our products and toolkits made available under an open source license. Alongside this we are committed to the development and adoption of open standards to support interoperability.
Our support of open standards has led to us joining implementers’ groups and delivering reference implementations. We’ve even helped author some national and international standards.