bdclean: user level cleaning workflow for the inexperienced R user

bdclean is a user-friendly data cleaning Shiny app for the inexperienced R user. It provides features to manage complete workflow for biodiversity data cleaning, including data upload; user input - in order to adjust cleaning procedures; data cleaning; and finally, generation of various reports and versions of the data (flagged, and cleaned). In order for bdclean to truly be practical, several unique and challenging R components were developed, such as a questionnaire module and high-quality report mechanism. Also, since bdclean was developed for the inexperienced R user, bdclean GUI is highly intuitive.

Architecture overview

Major challenges ahead

• Continuous Integration (CI) is more challenging for bdclean as it highly depended on many R packages outside the bdverse and within the bdverse.
• bdclean is a complex Shiny app, comprehensive testing techniques for apps are more challenging.

Future plans

Right now, the questionnaire and the cleaning procedures are designed for researchers dealing with species distribution modeling (SDM), as biodiversity data is being highly utilized for SDMs. with the help of the Biodiversity Informatics community, we plan to adjust bdclean to various other research domains, such as (i) alien and invasive species; (ii) collection data; (iii) agrobiodiversity; (iv) marine species; and (v) citizen science.