Request: A system to suggest metadata changes

[bendichter]

Here is an example of a great Dandiset: https://dandiarchive.org/dandiset/000957

The metadata is mostly right, but there are a few opportunities for improvement:

• the keywords are not separated as they should be
• The Funding information lists "Award Number: NIH BRAIN Initiative (U01NS113252)" when it should just be the grant code, without the "NIH BRAIN Initiative" label
• The paper related resource is annotated as "Resource type: dcite:Dataset" when it should clearly be "Resource type: dcite:Preprint".

The DANDI Archive is filled with these sorts of small mistakes that could be easily fixed by a curation process.

I would like a system that would allow a curator to suggest changes to the metadata of a Dandiset that they do not own.

My preferred approach would be that the curator could create a pull request on the metadata.yml file within the DataLab GitHub repo for that Dandiset (e.g. here). We could have an automatic email that goes to the maintainer (which is required for all Dandisets) alerting them to this curation PR and requesting approval. This could be done entirely manually at first (validating against the metadata schema) and we could gradually replace steps with API and LLM-based automations that a human curator oversees. I am not sure what machinery would be needed to update the archive metadata based on an approved PR, but I would hope that wouldn't be too difficult to do via a GitHub Action mechanism.