What is the bdverse?

A collection of packages that form a general framework for facilitating biodiversity science in R.

Our vision

To develop a sustainable and agile infrastructure that enhances the value of biodiversity data by allowing users to conveniently employ R, for data exploration, quality assessment, data cleaning, and standardization.

Objectives

• To advance user level data exploration and cleaning of biodiversity data in R.
• To support users with- and without programming capabilities.
• To promote implementation of biodiversity standards, methodology and tools being developed by the Biodiversity Informatics community.
• To enrich both the biodiversity research community and the R users community.

Project timetable

*GSoC stands for Google Summer of Code

Development strategy

Building and maintaining the bdverse is like building a ‘house of cards’, due to the massive dependencies between dozens of R packages. We bare this in mind going into any development task.

Our plans for the next few months, before officially launching the bdverse:

• Our focal point for the near future is QA+CI+GUI. Our efforts will be focused on developing a robust quality assurance (QA) framework; implementing continuous integration (CI) across the bdverse, and enhancing the GUI as much as possible.
• We will construct thebdverse package, that will install all bdverse features using a single code line: install.packages("bdverse").
• We are working on submitting the released bdverse packages to rOpenSci software review as soon as the packages meet core requirements.
• We also hope to implement Shiny modules (trials will start soon).
• We will upgrade the bdverse website, to better showcase the different bdverse features to users, and to give it a more sleek look.

Our plans for the second development phase are:

• To identify key missing features, and address them using three GSoC projects.
• To establish one or two more GSoC project, that will be devoted to purely experimental challenges.

Fundings