INCEpTION proposed for the Eclipse Foundation – please support until 16 October

[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

Hello everybody,

we have submitted an incubation proposal for INCEpTION at the Eclipse Foundation.

https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-inception [1]

Help us make this proposal a success by upvoting and leaving supportive comments.
The open proposal period runs for at least three weeks, i.e. until at least
16 October 2026. A free Eclipse account is required to participate.

https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/emo-team/emo/-/work_items/1407 [2]

Thank you in advance for any support and contribution you might provide to this process.

See below for more details.

We hope the proposal will be successful, and that INCEpTION finds a new permanent home
at the Eclipse Foundation.

----

# What is it about?

INCEpTION was created during the DFG-funded project "Infrastruktur für interaktive
verteilte Exploration und Annotation grosser Korpora und Wissensbasen" (Interactive
distributed corpus exploration and annotation infrastructure for large corpora and
knowledge-bases) [3] which ran from 2016 to 2022 under the principal investigators
Richard Eckart de Castilho and Iryna Gurevych at the UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt.

INCEpTION has become one of the central tools for text annotation for a broad
range of annotation tasks. In 2025/2026 alone, according to a current tally,
over 190 publications report having used INCEpTION to prepare their research results [4]
and it has also been the most used text annotation tool at recent LREC conferences [5,6].

Since the DFG project ended, the UKP Lab has continued to support the development and
maintenance of the software.

Now, we plan to take the next step to ensure the long-term availability and maintenance
of INCEpTION by incubating it at the Eclipse Foundation. The foundation provides governance,
IP processes and development infrastructure that help the project meet the increasingly
regulated environment of software development, in particular the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

# What changes for me?

As a user: you can still download and use INCEpTION for free as before. And you
can do so with the trust that INCEpTION is in good hands. So bottom line: nothing changes ;)
Eclipse allows projects under the Apache License 2.0 that INCEpTION already uses, so there
should not be any need to change the license.

As a contributor: contributing to Eclipse projects requires signing the Eclipse Contributor
Agreement (ECA) which confirms that you have the right to contribute and that your
contribution is made under the project's open-source license. As before, the copyright
to contributions remains with the contributor. We plan to continue using GitHub for
development. Package names and Maven group IDs will change. We will provide migration notes
where necessary.

The project will be renamed to Eclipse INCEpTION and the foundation will own and protect
this name as a trademark.

----

Cheers,

-- Richard Eckart de Castilho on behalf of the INCEpTION project


[1] https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-inception
[2] https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/emo-team/emo/-/work_items/1407
[3] https://gepris.dfg.de/project/315979217/2
[4] https://inception-project.github.io/papers-using-inception/
[5] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reckart_welcome-activity-7198287063576629248-JZlM
[6] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inception-lrec-2026-richard-eckart-de-castilho-ejshf/

[Andreas Zankl]

Hi Richard,

Very happy to support this, but where exactly do we leave our supportive comments?

Should we just add them here:  https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/emo-team/emo/-/work_items/1407 

Andreas

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[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

Hello Andreas,

thank you for the question :)

So, the best place to comment is not the tracking issue but rather the
proposal page itself. After logging in, you should see a comment form
at the bottom of the page.

https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-inception

## What kinds of comments could one leave?

The goal is to show the Eclipse Foundation that INCEpTION has an active,
real-world user base. You can simply express your interest in the project
as a user, suggest improvements to the proposal itself, or highlight
specific ways you rely on the software:

- Personal Use: If you used INCEpTION, possibly chose it over other
alternatives for specific reasons, you could highlight that.

- Institutional Use: If you run an INCEpTION server for a research group,
institution, community, or country, mentioning that is a huge plus.

- Scientific Publications: If you used INCEpTION in the preparation of a
scientific publication, it is worth a note—in particular if you plan to
do so again.

- Funding & Grants: If you wrote into a funding proposal that your research
project uses INCEpTION, that strongly demonstrates the project's value.

- Teaching & Education: Let us know if you use INCEpTION to teach students,
or feature it in tutorials and workshops for your community.

- Future Contributions: Note if you have contributed to INCEpTION in the past,
or could imagine doing so in the future - especially if becoming an Eclipse
project would facilitate those contributions.

Here is an example of a past project (Eclipse Milo) that successfully gathered
exactly this kind of feedback from interested parties:

https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/milo

Cheers,

-- Richard

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[Andreas Zankl]

Hi Richard,

I submitted a supportive comment at https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-inception a few days ago and got a message that it will be posted after it has been reviewed by the site admin, but it's still not showing. Should it take that long or did something go wrong?

Andreas

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/inception-users/EE972037-50FA-47B5-9758-AAC9AF2483E9%40gmail.com.

[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

Hi Andreas,

> On 30. Sep 2026, at 03:39, Andreas Zankl <andrea...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I submitted a supportive comment at https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-inception a few days ago and got a message that it will be posted after it has been reviewed by the site admin, but it's still not showing. Should it take that long or did something go wrong?

Again thank you very much for pointing this out. I was not aware of there
being a moderation system in place. I have left a comment on the issue
tracking the proposal, asking the coordinator at Eclipse whether they
could approve any incoming comments.

Cheers,

-- Richard

[Marketa PS]

Dear Richard, 

I also left a brief comment. 

All the best, 

Markéta

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