Describo Newsletter 2

[marcolarosa]

Welcome to the second edition of Describo News! It turns out that the first edition was sent just
over 1 year ago and though I'd hoped to be writing sooner, hopefully the wait will be worth it.

A lot has happened with Describo over the last year. Specifically, it has evolved well past a simple
metadata editor into a workspace for researchers with tools to describe your data; transcribe
digitsed content and a conversational AI Assistant to support e-Discovery.

Following are some of the highlights:

First up: a very big thankyou to my collaborators

Describo today wouldn't be where it is without the help and support of my Hungarian friends at
SZTAKI - Department of Distributed Systems:
Balazs E. Pataki and Réka Csontos. Between them they have contributed a massive amount of
development effort to the embeddable component including internationalisation, themes and fine grained
constraints on data types. Oh - and bugfixes and general support. A big thankyou to them.

I'd also like to thank Mike Jones who has recently been helping test and review the Desktop
application as the Describo Research Consultant in Archives and History. He's only been on board for
a short time but his help has already been invaluable.

👏 👏 👏

Website

The main website has had a massive makeover:
https://describo.github.io.

And comprehensive user friendly documentation is available to take you through what you can do:
https://describo.github.io/docs/guide/five-minute-tutorial.html

I invite you to have a browse to see what you can do. Specifically, check out the
product tour which takes you on a journey through all of the
capabilites available to you.

Describo Desktop and describo.cloud

The product tour shows what you get with Describo Desktop.
There is no cost for the product - it's FREE. However, if you choose to subscribe to the cloud
service (free) and purchase credits, you unlock optical character recognition, named entity
recognition and conversational AI capabilities.

Check out some of the documentation to see how this works:

• Content transcription and entity markup
• Assistant supported e-discovery
  • be sure to check out the video of the assistant interrogating the RO-Crate paper

For Developers: The Embeddable Component

A lot has happened in the embeddable component. If you are a developer and you want to embed an
RO-Crate engine into your app then look no further. With configuration to precisely control the operation and define the look and
feel you can customise almost everything about it for your use case. If you want to know more,
checkout the documentation:
https://describo.github.io/docs/component/introduction.html

Profiles

A lot has happened in the area of profiles as well. To refresh your memory - a profile tells
Describo what users are allowed to do. And profiles can do a lot. Check out the documentation at
https://describo.github.io/docs/profiles/introduction.html
but here's some of the highlights:

• All sorts of primitives to control the data that can be entered. And with constraints, you can
  define the form of the data exactly. see:
  https://describo.github.io/docs/profiles/types.html
• Layouts to control exactly how entities should be displayed: see:
  https://describo.github.io/docs/profiles/layouts.html;
• Associations - get Describo to define reverse associations between entities as a user works:
  e.g. hasMember <-> isMemberOf or whatever else you need: see
  https://describo.github.io/docs/profiles/associations.html
• Full localisation in both the component and the data display in the UI via the profile: see
  https://describo.github.io/docs/profiles/localisation.html

Give us a star?

If you like this please consider giving us a star @ https://github.com/describo/describo.github.io or any (all?) of the other repositories. This work is coming to you from open source volunteers and star's make us feel good. :-)

Questions, issues, concerns

If you have any questions, issues, concerns about the component or services please don't hesitate to raise tickets in the respective tracker. If you're not sure, start up a discussion right here: https://github.com/orgs/describo/discussions.

Thanks!
Marco