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nlplab / brat

brat rapid annotation tool (brat) - for all your textual annotation needs
http://brat.nlplab.org
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weaver.nlplab.org is down? #1374

Closed joshuacrotts closed 1 year ago

joshuacrotts commented 3 years ago

I've tried several connections to the online demo of BRAT but couldn't connect.

johann-petrak commented 3 years ago

Has been down for weeks it seems. It hosts the file the download link points to too.

Why is that file not hosted as a release file on this GitHub repo?

gabrer commented 3 years ago

@JoshuaCrotts: an alternative link to download it is here.

Another one here.

johann-petrak commented 3 years ago

Oh so the "release" is actually just the tar.gz archive of the git repo anyways? So maybe the latest source tarball in the Releases list is the latest then? https://github.com/nlplab/brat/releases/tag/v1.3p1 It is from 2012 though. All a bit weird and looks like the project is not very alive any more.

ghost commented 3 years ago

On Mon 05 Jul 2021, Johann Petrak wrote:

Oh so the "release" is actually just the tar.gz archive of the git repo anyways? So maybe the latest source tarball in the Releases list is the latest then? https://github.com/nlplab/brat/releases/tag/v1.3p1

Yes, unless I am wrong that is exactly what we did back then. Possibly we also added the version string in a place or two, but certainly nothing more than that.

It is from 2012 though.

We were always very careful about releases back then, as we considered data losses to be unacceptable – in particular in the form of data corruption. Thus every release was put through a month or so of annotation efforts by our group and others in order to ensure that it was truly rock solid. Sadly, as we had no joint annotation projects after 2013 when the three core developers were spread across different groups and institutions, no further release was ever made.

All a bit weird and looks like the project is not very alive any more.

I would disagree with using the term “alive”, “inactive” is probably more accurate as the software itself is certainly still working. Although @amadanmath continues to answer questions and send in the odd patch now and then and deserves a huge thank you for this.

It is difficult to maintain long-term support for an academic tool like brat. No academic funding has been received for soon ten years and even back when we were putting a serious effort into it, this was largely in addition to whatever else we needed to do for our academic careers. As for weaver, we paid out of our own pocket for the server up until some time this year when a credit card expired, which led to the provider closing down and deleting our server instance. The last backup is at least a year old and I sadly lack the cycles to get it back up and running somewhere. If there were not several commercial actors in the area, perhaps I would be willing to revive the idea of starting some sort of brat hosting/support company to fund development, but I feel that if I should have acted on that idea I should have done so a decade ago and not now.

I can only speak for certain about myself, but I doubt I will find the time to polish up the project and get things in order. However, I should end this rather depressing response with the fact that brat still is very much functioning software – despite being inactive – and used daily across a number of organisations to produce annotations in a far more user-friendly way than was possible before its inception.

If someone out there wants to roll up their sleeves and take a stab at cleaning up the code, website, etc. I would be all for it. Perhaps we should have put some more effort into onboarding other maintainers, but if you look at the contributors I think it tells the story that brat pretty much was always a three-man show.

cmvalma commented 2 years ago

It's a pity, but it is more than totally understandable @ninjin. I just wanted to say thanks for all the effort you and the others put into this for free...