Development/Summer of Code/2022/BookBrainz

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This page will discuss the current list of suggested ideas for students to develop proposals for Google's Summer of Code for BookBrainz. If you're a student, feel free to base your proposal on one of these ideas, or pick and entirely new idea that you think might be useful to us.

Getting Started

(see also: Getting started with GSoC)

The first thing to do to get started with BookBrainz is to clone the bookbrainz-site GitHub repository, and follow the README.md file and our developer documentation to get the site up and running on your computer.

We have a testing website at test.bookbrainz.org with its own separate database. You can create an account there and use it to get familiar with the website and database without fear of adding inadequate data.

Come and speak to us in the BookBrainz IRC (Libera.Chat/#bookbrainz) if you finish all of that, or get stuck at any point!

Ideas

Here are some suggestions of projects that would improve BookBrainz. Of course, suggestion means you're not limited to these ideas and can propose your own if after using BookBrainz you find a substantial area you can improve.

Design and implement a unified creation form

Proposed Mentors: Monkey
Languages/skills: User interfaces, User Experience, React, Node.js
Estimated Project Length: 350 hours Difficulty: hard

Forum for discussion

This project requires a solid knowledge of the BookBrainz schema and edit pages.

As each entity has a separate creation page, users are faced with a complex workflow for simple use cases (such as 'adding a book I have') with lots of repetition (for example the title of a work repeated for an edition and an edition group, in a simple use case of a book), increasing chances of making errors.

Such a basic workflow should be a lot more straightforward (especially for inexperienced users). The goal of this project is to design and implement a single form that will improve the editing experience.

Some form of separation (like tabs) will be necessary to separate the different entities forms as steps. For each step, entities can be either searched for and selected, or created. While it would be best to show only the strict necessary fields for each step at first to limit clutter, users should have the full range of options of the current forms accessible easily. The form will automatically create the relevant relationships and links between the entities.

Keep in mind that "adding a book" is a simple case, and that we should be able to optionally enter more complicated cases (for example an anthology of short stories will have multiple Works, and the title of the Edition may be different from any of the Works it contains). Or an anthology of various Authors might be attributed on the cover to a single Author.

The first phase should be to make a mockup with a prototyping/wireframing tool (for example: Sketch, Figma, Pencil Project). We will work together iteratively during both the UX and implementation sections of the project.

Here are three example scenarios of different level users. The unified form should allow for each of them and provide the best user experience possible.

Scenario 1 User is new to BookBrainz and adding their first book. They don’t know what the different entities are, or what relationships are. The book to enter is a physical book the user has, a novel. The author’s name and title fo the book are on the cover.

Scenario 2 User has entered some books already for an author, The book is a collection of 20 short stories from that same author, written under a pen name. The pen name is on the cover, and the title of the book is different from the title of any of the short stories. The user has an ebook version and a paperback from another publisher borrowed from the library. The book is a translation, and the translator is well known and their name appears on the first page.

Scenario 3 User has been using BookBrainz for a long time and understands how all entities relate User has a series of magazines (35 issues) they want to add. The magazine has multiple editors


Import the (now defunct) Bookogs database

Proposed Mentors: Monkey
Languages/skills: SQL, Node.js, knowledge of BookBrainz schema
Estimated Project Length: 350 hours Difficulty: hard

Forum for discussion

The sites Bookogs and Comicogs, sister projects of Discogs, have been closed in 2020; some editors elected BookBrainz to continue contributing open data.

The Bookogs database dumps were made publicly available for download in json format right after the closing of the project. In order to prevent the loss of Bookogs contributions we want to import all the entries from the database dumps, as discussed in this thread.

This will require processing very large json files in a robust manner, creating "adapters" to transform entities from one database schema to the other, allowing for repeating the process without duplicating entries. You will put together a detailed plan fo action ahead of time

Discussions are in progress for matching roles, formats and genres to BookBrainz' schema.


Administration system

Proposed Mentors: Monkey
Languages/skills: Node.js, SQL, ExpressJS
Estimated Project Length: 175 hours Difficulty: easy

Forum for discussion


BookBrainz currently has no administration system, or any good way of giving users special privileges. This certainly needs to change!

For this project, you will be devising and implementing a basic admin system allowing for a flexible privilege hierarchy.

This will require:

  • Modifying the database schema, adding at least:
    • a table to define roles
    • a table to attach users to roles
  • Implementing a simple admin panel back-end page to allow admins to give users privileges (and remove them if needed)
  • Middleware for securing specific routes according to a user's roles:
    • admins can view the admin panel
    • admins can block or deleted abusive users
    • privileged editors can edit relationships and identifiers
    • privileged editors can trigger a reindex of the search server

Extended goal: a public log of administration actions (see for example the CritiqueBrainz admin log)


CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities

Proposed Mentors: Monkey, Alastair
Languages/skills: Python, SQL, ReactJS
Estimated Project Length: 350 hours Difficulty: medium

CritiqueBrainz gives users a way to write Creative Commons licensed reviews and ratings linked to MusicBrainz. If an entity is in MusicBrainz, you can review it on CritiqueBrainz.

Considering the importance of book reviews in the literature world, we would like to extend CritiqueBrainz to allow users to review BookBrainz entities. There are a lot of similarities between the sister projects MusicBrainz and BookBrainz, which makes it possible for us to extend the infrastructure of CritiqueBrainz to support both.

This project would be implemented partly on the CritiqueBrainz side using python, and partly on the BookBrainz side using React/javascript).

On the CritiqueBrainz side, you would

  • support connecting to the BookBrainz database
  • load BookBrainz entities and required data (no ORM exists in python; the existing BookBrainz ORM is written in javascript)
  • extend the CritiqueBrainz project to support new entity types from BookBrainz
    • Author, Work, Edition Group, Series

On the BookBrainz side:

  • implement the front-end components to allow users to write and send reviews and ratings to CB
  • retrieve and display existing reviews and ratings for an entity on various pages