Thanks to a new Web site developed by Stanford scientists, students moving out this summer will be able to donate their unwanted belongings to charity instead of throwing them away.

Charitopia.org was founded in March as a resource for the San Jose chapter of Habitat for Humanity to locate donors. The site has since been modified to include other charitable organizations.

The site’s developers thought the service would be especially relevant as students move out of housing at the end of this school year.

“For example, say that you are moving out of your apartment and want to get rid of your TV and your old couch,” said Michael Kassoff, a computer science graduate student who helped develop the Web site. “You can list those items on Charitopia and needy charities can contact you about those items.”

Kassoff said the site serves an important purpose as a conduit between potential donors and charitable organizations. He added that it was “a big waste of time” for charities and donors to find each other through guesswork, and a flurry of telephone calls and emails.

Charitopia was developed by the Stanford Logic Group (SLG) — which is comprised of computer science students and researchers — and by a group of lawyers from the Stanford Center for Computers and Law.

Computer Science Prof. Michael Genesereth, who heads SLG, described the scientific motives behind the development of the site.

“The main technical reason for working on Charitopia is to develop the product ontology — or classification and properties of products — and to develop, deploy and test semantic matching algorithms,” he said. “The benefits of these innovations are already evident but will become clearer in future versions of the system.”

In the future, the web developers will create a separate page for the existing service that allows individuals to donate to each other.

“Eventually, this part of Charitopia will be spun off into a sister system called Freetopia,” said Genesereth. “It is a sort of free eBay. The only constraint is that the goods be free.”

About 10 charities have signed on so far, including the Silicon Valley chapter of Habitat for Humanity, AIDSfreeAFRICA and the Belle Haven School. Genesereth expects a few dozen more to join in the next couple of weeks.

Kassoff said the site’s convenience and efficiency are attractive to users.

“It’s a fully automated process,” he said. “Charitopia allows donors and charities to specify products in terms of their properties, in such a way that the computer can understand what is being described.”

While the nascent Web site is still fairly simple, its developers envision future enhancements. Despite its current limitations, however, Genesreth said he thinks the site will still be popular among students and charities.

“There are many improvements waiting in the wings,” he said, “but we think we have a sufficiently usable service to put it out there for general use.”