This project needs a heavy redesign of the landing homepage and it should change the language not to confuse the developers.

Hyrax is a frontend of Hydra with CMS and social features. It's a merger of https://github.com/projecthydra/sufia and https://github.com/projecthydra/curation_concerns

Hydra is a web applications framework based on the digital asset management repository (Fedora) and the search index (Solr). Demos: https://projecthydra.org/apps-demos-2-2/

Fedora stands for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. Its repository is based on the Linked Data Platform (5-star linked data according to Tim Berners-Lee http://5stardata.info/en/). An intro presentation: http://fedorarepository.org/presentations.

In regard to the name:

In 1997 a research project at Cornell University was named the Flexibile Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora). In 1998 the Fedora name was used in article published by Payette and Lagoze and in research software that was released to the public under the Fedora name.

In 2005 Red Hat, Inc. filed a trademark request for the name "Fedora" to be associated with their Linux operating system project. Cornell and UVA formally disputed the request and, as a final settlement, all parties settled on a co-existence agreement [...]

This is a good but incomplete summary.

1) the project before was called Hydra, but couldn't use the name anymore because of prior art

1.2) hyrax is a frontend for hyku which is basically a split of Hydra into 2 projects

2) the whole thing stores everything in fedora (fcrepo4/fedora commons 4) which is basically a data/key storage that calls itself repository

2.1) it is used to store the data with the according "metadata"

3) the idea behind hyrax is for scientists to work on their research and collaborate with other scientists

3.1) that is why the project was called Hydra because every researcher could work on their own "head" and the heads could collaborate with each other

3.2) the hyrax project now supports multi tenancy so that multiple people can work on it simultaneously

4) after the research is done the whole thing can be published with backlight

This project is a collaboration of multiple universities and entered beta on the third of may to collaborate on the testing/documentation

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with this project, but setup a test system for the university I work at.

PS yes this is all pretty confusing and hard to work with, but a worthwhile cooperation

swing and a miss on choosing new names without prior uses

How about Hyrothrax? That name got a fine Anthrax-vibe going for it!

They should hire you to write this because I read that entire about page and was still wondering what this had to do with a Linux distro. Thanks for the clarification!

Nothing here is what I expected:

- a "repository solution" is not a thing for source control like Github. It's a CMS or a file sharing system or something.

- "Fedora" is not a Linux distribution. It's a previous repository solution software.

- this homepage causes more questions than it answers. No screenshots. No examples.

Haha, yeah. And when I saw it was based on "Hydra" I thought it was the Nix/Guix continuous build system. I was briefly really excited!

What the hell is a repository solution? A CMS?

Same question I had, it looks like that's an accurate description. From the "Fedora" link on their front page, which this tool is apparently built on:

Fedora is a robust, modular, open source repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials as well as scientific data. Fedora has a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural heritage organizations, universities, research institutions, university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies.

As an aside, FOSS projects: Please think before overloading common names, like a popular Linux distro.

As a double aside: Think about your target audience. Most developers hear "repository" and think VCSes.

Fedora (the repository software) predates Fedora (the operating system) by about six years: http://fedorarepository.org/about

Well, they did not "override" Fedora Linux name, because Fedora Commons preceded its OS counterpart by a couple years and has a trademark for the Fedora logo: http://fedora-commons.org/about

By repository they mean digital asset management repository instead of a version control system repository.

so may be start with explaining that this is not a repository as a developer would expect.

I think they represent the library community more than the dev community and are a bit stubborn to use the terms familiar to us (IMO).

I mean, why wouldn't librarians be stubborn with respect to jargon? The intended audience clearly isn't Hacker News and the terms of the trade predate the tech community by decades in many cases- it doesn't make sense to just throw terminology to the wind.

It'd be like if a bunch of Frenchmen suddenly invaded England and forced them to speak French, even though English was perfectly sufficient for communication already.

Oh wait...

That's what I was thinking. I was reading the several about pages, and as someone who has never been introduced to any of these concepts, nothing really seems to describe what the software actually accomplishes.

Its probably short sighted and biased, but I looked up Portland Common Data Model, read a little, saw the key phrases "Data Model" and "Ontology", and ran. Anything to do with formal Ontology specifications feels like overly abstracted databases.

You could think about it as MediaGoblin, but for academic institutions.

A place to store images, video, or other kinds of digital stuff.

Hyrax comes with an interface for uploading/searching/viewing the files that are stored in the repository.

In a certain sense it is like VCS in that it does versioning.

This is a much better description than what is on the homepage. Why doesn't it just say this??

I don't understand any of this shit. Like, what is this a package management system for?

Information.

So uh... It rivals .txt files?

Sounds like vaporware to me, also they didn't do too much research about their name, because this is the hyrax I deal with day to day: http://docs.opendap.org/index.php/Hyrax

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_repository