Proposed Student Projects

Dryad occasionally has the opportunity to work with student interns through projects like the Google Summer of Code and the DataONE internship program. This page collects ideas for projects that are suitable for student work. All of these projects provide valuable progress for Dryad. They are relatively self-contained projects, requiring a minimal amount of background knowledge before the student is able to make a meaningful contribution.

Small tasks from the current development queue
Below is a list of student-accessible projects culled from the current development queue. It may be outdated, as items are continually moved into and out of the queue:
 * FEAT: Improve robustness of build/deploy process https://trello.com/c/5wXNaSi0
 * FEAT: detect items with inappropriate embargo settings https://trello.com/c/YfHWSQfM
 * BUG: PMID lookup problems https://trello.com/c/pF5KOio5
 * FEAT: automate weekly integration reports to journals https://trello.com/c/Goddbwr2
 * FEAT: automate weekly summary reports https://trello.com/c/vsCMaBqY
 * FEAT: Display of non-DOI identifiers https://trello.com/c/M1qdfd59
 * FEAT: Improve curation report for profileformats https://trello.com/c/31zurH4g
 * FEAT: Altmetrics for data packages https://trello.com/c/7TVeLJNK

Improving the Dryad API
Implement the proposal for a new Dryad API.

Cleaning Temporal Metadata
The temporal coverage metadata is not standardized. There is a mix of actual dates, date ranges, geologic periods, and more free-form statements (e.g., "~100 MYA", "the last 50 years"). Determine a formal method for representing the various types of statements, and convert all entries to conform to this format.

Generating Reports
Develop more reports that are needed from the list of Curator Reports.

Improve the process for generating statistics associated with Dryad. There are two types of statistics, those associated with periodic reports to stakeholders (e.g., board meetings, annual reports to funders), and those associated with the Global Statistics Display.

Publish Dryad Metadata as LOD
This goal includes 1.) registering Dryad-specific + relevant properties at an appropriate Dryad name space (e.g., datadryad.org), so that Dryad metadata published as linked data can resolve. 2.) generating current Dryad metadata (where appropriate) as linked data, following on the DataONE LOD4DataONE work completed by Aida Gandara https://notebooks.dataone.org/lod4dataone/author/aida-gandara/ [summer 2011].

Dryad Metadata DCAP (Dublin Core Application Profile)
Follow on the initial DCAP work generated for Dryad AP 2.0 to the current 3.0 version and publish the work as a DCAP compliant with the DCMI Singapore Framework. This could be integrated into the LOD project noted above

HIVE and Dbpedia comparison for indexing Dryad holdings
Compare HIVE vocabularies and Dbpedia's underlying terminology for indexing Dryad content. A mapping experiment with Dryad's current search logs might also be considered.

ORCID work
Students could work on some of the projects proposed for ORCID Integration.

Lingering Issues
The Dryad issue-tracking system contains many issues that have not been resolved. Many of these issues could be addressed by a student. A student could approach these issues in two ways:
 * 1) Identify individual issues that are tractable and solve them. These issues include problems like minor usability tweaks and documentation needs.
 * 2) Identify classes of issues that occur frequently. Develop tools/processes to either prevent these issues or to solve these issues as they occur.