Open Technologies Alliance (GFOSS) is a non-profit organization founded in 2008, 37 Universities and Research Centers are shareholders of GFOSS. Our main goal is to promote Openness through the use and the development of Open Standards and Open Technologies in Education, Public Administration and Business in Greece.
We are platform for Open Standards, Free Software, Open Content, Open Data & Open Hardware in Greece. The major Greek Universities and Research Centers participate in GFOSS, while leading members of the Greek community of developers play a key role in the implementation of our policies.
GFOSS is affiliated with Creative Commons, is a founding member of COMMUNIA and FAB LAB ATHENS, member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Network, Node of the Open Data Institute(http://opendatainstitute.org/), partner of the Open Forum Europe (http://www.openforumeurope.org), member of the Open Budget Initiative (http://internationalbudget.org/what-we-do/major-ibp-initiatives/open-budget-initiative/), member of the Open Policy Network(https://openpolicynetwork.org/), Associate Organisation of FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe), Associate Member of Eclipse Foundation (https://eclipse.org/), Associate Organization of OW2 Consortium (https://www.ow2.org/) and local hub of MyData (https://mydata.org/hubs/).
GFOSS also cooperates with the Enterprise Europe Network – Hellas in the ICT sector, with the aim to assist companies that provide Open Technology services. Nine members of GFOSS participate in GRNET‘s project, FOSS Centers of Excellence, the centers deliver training activities for developing and promoting FOSS software in ten subject areas.
GFOSS has a framework agreement with the Ministry of Education, within this agreement GFOSS has designed the edulabs initiative, edulabs have been installed in 144 Schools in all major cities in Greece. Each Lab is equipped with Raspberry Pi’s, Robotics Kits and a 3D Printer and Scanner, all labs run a special open source distribution that contains all open source educational software and educational materials used in Greek Schools and is available in GitHub. This software has been collected by a community of about 330 teachers that actively participate in open education projects of GFOSS, all this information is collected in open repositories at edu.ellak.gr.
As part of its mission to promote openness and collaborative innovation, GFOSS developed GlossAPI (glossapi.gr), an initiative aimed at strengthening the Greek language in the age of artificial intelligence and establishing it on equal footing with major European and international languages within the natural language processing (NLP) ecosystem. GlossAPI was born from the realization that the greatest obstacle to developing Greek language models was not the lack of technology, but the lack of high-quality, well-documented and openly licensed data in Greek — for instance, the English Wikipedia exceeds 80 GB, while the Greek one is limited to approximately 1 GB.
GlossAPI is an open-source Python library and technical infrastructure for creating, processing and publishing Greek datasets ready for use in AI and NLP applications (AI-ready). The library processes texts from various file formats (PDF, DOCX, HTML, etc.), cleans, standardizes and annotates the data, and exports it in formats such as Parquet and Markdown, with full documentation and open licenses. To date, 15 high-quality datasets have been produced and published, covering public consultations, encyclopedic texts, academic theses and works of Greek literature. GlossAPI is guided by the principles of transparency, participation, open standards and ethical AI, with respect for rights and democratic oversight.
GFOSS experts share extensive multidisciplinary experience in the development and operation of major open source projects in education, transparency and public engagement. These include the projects on electronic deliberation for participatory decision making, open innovation and open education. To better coordinate and promote our projects we have established working groups, with more than 200 participants, each group drafts its own action plan using our WIKI.
Contact Info:
GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance
Address: Iroon Politechniou 9, Zografou 157 73
e-mail: info AT eellak DOT gr
Telephone: +30 210-220-9380