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??