Describo has reached end of life.

[marcolarosa]

The Describo products are no longer being developed or maintained.

It's an unfortunate reality that the environment for academic research software is difficult, and often times, even hostile.

Describo Started life as a product to enable users to create RO-Crate metadata for their research data. It went through a number of iterations and achieved a small degree of success across the research sector. But the funding to create the product was limited and available only in spurts.

In 2024, in an effort to develop a recurring funding stream to support the open source RO Crate editor component, I invested a significant amount of personal effort to develop Describo into a product for HASS researchers to use to work with data as well as describe it. After a decade supporting archivists, historians and linguists I felt there was an opportunity to help the 95% who to this day are still being told to find their own support people and to run their own server applications. If you've worked in this space you know that this is neither feasible nor realistic for most people and projects.

Describo was meant to help with that problem. As a personal application it aimed to reduce the friction associated with extracting textual content from images, marking up entities and relationships, analysing the network of connections and ultimately producing a well described data object.

Sadly though, I wasn't able to develop an ongoing funding stream to support this effort so the time has come to shut the project down and move on.

Marco; Describo Product Lead.