About us
Ontola is a software development company that specializes in web applications, SAAS development and linked data. We love innovation, open data en open technology.
Our mission: give back control over your data
We believe that many companies with pretty words about how they will improve the world can often not be trusted. Companies almost always have a focus on making money, not charity. So if you stop reading after this line, we understand.
Unfortunately, that way we won't be able to give you our message: a little trust is necessary in a digital world, but you can minimize how much you need by using the right development principles.
We have three goals that will minimize how much trust you need to have in us as a company:
- Full data ownership. You (as either a customer or as a user of the software that we build) should have total control over your data. That's why we work on Atomic Data.
- No vendor lock-in. We build software using open standards. That way, other developers can use and edit the same software and data. We strive to do as much open source as possible.
- Independent. We strive to make our software work without dependencies on third parties.
We're not fully there yet, but this is where we're going. We don't do this just to make the world a little better, but also to make money. People are increasingly aware of the risks of the digital world, and we provide tools to protect against that. We don't want to earn money using your data or your depencence on us, but because of the value we add.
For now, these are only words. We're not expecting you to believe everything we write, but you can always use these words to hold us accountable.
Things that we do
- As a team we spend most of our time working on the e-democracy platform Argu, which is used by many organizations to get people engaged in decision-making processes.
- We're also responsible for the technology of the OpenBesluitvorming.nl project, which aims to turn all Dutch governmental meeting minutes and decisions into linked open data.
- We've worked with Inrupt on the Solid project.
- We're building Atomic Data, an open specification + graph server that makes it easier to share data on the web.
- We're working on Dexes, an online marketplace for sharing data.
