| Project Title | Description | Mentor Volunteers |
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| TranslateWiki Integration | The DSpace community has approached TranslateWiki.net (TWN), the mediawikibased platform for interface translation of open source projects. The initial discussions are promising and the TWN community is currently building support for the Apache Cocoon message format that is used by XMLUI. We need an ambitious GSOC student to connect the dots, working with both communities in extending the integration and ensuring that in the end, the threshold is lowered for external translators to provide interface translations for DSpace. Related Links: Related DSpace Components: Recommended Skills: - Multilingual and/or translation experience
- Familiarity with Java web application Internationalization
Difficulty Level: Medium | Bram Luyten (Atmire) | | Virtual Sets: Separate the internal repository structure from the navigation structure | Currently, the hierarchical structure used in DSpace allows sharing items between collections by explicitly declaring these relations on each item. However, DSpace does not allow to relate a collection or a sub-community between two or more communities. Virtual Sets are arbitrary aggregations of DSpace Objects and criteria, composed of: - arbitrarily selected communities, collections and/or items,
- dynamic results from criteria/queries (logical expressions; e.g. Solr queries)
- other declared Virtual Sets (initially, cycles are not allowed)
Virtual Sets in DSpace would allow the creation of complex navigation structures regardless of the hierarchical (perhaps administrative) structure of communities and collections. Structures, as described above, are supported in at least another repository software such as Fedora-based Hydra due to its generic object model. The initial implementation would affect the dspace-api component and either of the web UIs, since both now use Discovery (Solr) by default. Virtual Sets should be implemented at the dspace-api level for DSpace Objects to offer more orthogonal features like Virtual Sets backup, export and exposure through OAI-PMH. Stretch goals would include making use of Virtual Sets in other interfaces like REST and/or OAI. Related links: Related DSpace Components: Recommended Skills: - Java programming experience
Difficulty Level: High | Ivan Masár | | Create a puppet-dspace module | Develop a Puppet-DSpace module for deploying DSpace, and provisioning DSpace-related services. The goal would be to deploy on at least one popular Linux OS, and likely the target will be Debian/Ubuntu since testing will be done with Vagrant-DSpace, which currently uses only Ubuntu. The final product should be useful for deploying DSpace to a cloud infrastructure, or really any server configured to run Puppet (in other words, the module should make no assumptions that rely upon paths used by Vagrant). A stretch goal for this project will be to make the puppet module OS-agnostic, and have it run on both Debian/Ubuntu as well as CentOS/RHEL. But just meeting the Ubuntu target would be sufficient for this project. The puppet module already built for use in Vagrant-DSpace would be a great starting point. The module, when complete, should enable an operator to go from a standard OS base image to a running instance of DSpace, complete with a container to host the application, and (optionally) a PostgreSQL database for metadata. Related DSpace Components/Links: - vagrant-dspace : A Vagrant setup for DSpace development. It includes the "starting point" for a puppet-dspace module under "/modules/dspace/"
- Installing DSpace : DSpace 4 Installation instructions
Recommended Skills: - Experience with Puppet or similar tools (e.g. Chef). At a minimum some base familiarity and even some Ruby experience (which Puppet is based on).
- Familiarity with Vagrant, or willingness to learn.
Difficulty Level: Medium | Hardy Pottinger Andrea Schweer | | Next-gen UI | MDS is an experimental offshoot of DSpace in which new ideas may be prototyped and examined. Recently a REST API (with CRUD operations, etc) has been added to MDS. A valuable 'proof of adequacy' is building an entire functional web UI backed only by the API. The goal of this project is to construct such an admin UI for MDS, using a modern, agile web application framework. A proof of concept using AngularJS already begun could serve as a basis for further work. Related DSpace Components: - mds : "Modernized DSpace". An attempt to refactor/redesign the DSpace API to make it more simplistic/modernized.This is a side-project of long-time Committer, Richard Rodgers
- mds/webapi : the REST API for MDS project. This API supports CRUD operations.
- dspace-rest (loosely related): the official REST API which now ships with DSpace 4 may also provide a possible integration point. However, it is currently read-only.
Recommended Skills: - Experience or familiarity with one or more agile web frameworks
- Experience or familiarity with buiding agile interfaces against a REST API
Difficulty Level: Medium to High | Richard Rodgers Andrea Schweer | | Metadata Re-Engineering | One of the main features of DSpace is support for dublin core metadata that can be used to describe digital assets such as publications, theses, datasets and multimedia. The original metadata schema remained largely unchanged and is no longer in line with the latest Dublin Core standards. A proposal for metadata enhancement has been defined and is waiting for an eager student to get implemented. Related Link: Related DSpace Components: Recommended Skills: - Experience or familiarity with Java development and EER Modeling.
Difficulty Level: Medium to High | Bram Luyten (Atmire) Mark Diggory | | Common Indexing Problems Detection Tool | Build a tool that can scan/survey a single DSpace installation for common Google Scholar / general search engine indexing issues. Preferably this tool would be in the form of a basic web service (a simple REST API would be nice, but not required), where someone could enter the URL of a DSpace installation. Then, the tool would perform a quick scan of that DSpace site to look for common indexing issues. A list of common indexing issues (specific to DSpace) has been provided to us by Anurag Acharya at Google Scholar. Some basic checks would include: - Are sitemaps enabled?
- Is the location of the Sitemaps noted in the robots.txt?
- Does the robots.txt accidentally block some common DSpace paths?
- Survey a few random item pages in the DSpace site. Do those item pages include various "citation_*" metatags which Google Scholar uses?
After scanning the DSpace site for common problems, the tool would display a report to the user. This report would detail what issues were discovered and how they could be potentially resolved. Related DSpace Components: As this tool would be external to DSpace, it is not directly related to DSpace codebase. However, obviously the XMLUI and JSPUI web interfaces are loosely related as they would be the target for the scan.
Recommended Skills: - This tool could be built in any language, though preferably using an agile web framework
Difficulty Level: Medium | |
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