TAO started in late 2002 as a joint project between the public research center Henri Tudor and the University of Luxembourg.
In late 2002, The Henri Tudor Research Center- which is now the Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology (LIST) and the University of Luxembourg were beginning to develop practical applications for their Semantic web research. The Center conceived of a project to develop a highly flexible and customizable computer-based assessment (CBA) platform that would be 100% web-based. This platform would then be freely available to the education community worldwide. The final result — the TAO platform — made it possible for test developers to define their own ontologies and data models for the first time. TAO’s Open-Source philosophy enabled communities of users to contribute to the numerous functionalities required by such an advanced multi-purpose assessment platform. The Open-Source philosophy and the flexibility it allows remain the core elements of TAO’s technological and business strategy.
