Project Ideas – Part 1 – Looking for contributors

Image source – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/democratization-open-source-software-ngoc-tran

I am listing here few project ideas and requirements. If you are interested in contributing to any open source project, consider these to start with.

I am giving an intro about each of them in this series of blog posts.

Add your comment here if you pick any of the project to do, so that others can join with you.

1. Clean up Epub files.

We create epub files for FreeTamilEbooks.com by using Calibre. It creates epub files with lot of extra span and other tags. We need to remove all the unwanted tags from those epub files.

Create a command line or web application to clean up the given epub files.

If you are writing in python, plan to create a calibre plugin to clean the epub files.

Example epub file –
https://archive.org/download/pazhaiya-kuppaigal/pazhaiya-kuppaigal-jothiji.epub

2.  Download reports for Tamil Wikisource Ebooks

http://ta.wikisource is providing ebooks downloads.

In this database, all language wiki source ebook downloads are stored.

http://tools.wmflabs.org/wsexport/logs.sqlite

Create a web application or command line application to get the details of tamil books and create a download
count report for each book.

Create similar report as http://freetamilebooks.com/htmlbooks/download-report.html

 

3. Improve FreeTamilEbooks android app

The android app for FreeTamilEbooks has some bugs.
https://github.com/jskcse4/FreeTamilEBooks/issues

Use the App and read the issues.
Fix them.

 

4. OCR4WikiSource – Create a web application

OCR4WikiSource is a command line application that connects google ocr and wikisource.
It sends the pdf files to google drive, ocr it, gets text, sends to wikisource.

Create a web application to upload any pdf file, send to google via google vision api, get text, send to wikisource.

Links:
Here is the requirement.
https://github.com/tshrinivasan/OCR4wikisource/issues/89

Few links about it.
https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/announcing-ocr4wikisource/

https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/automating-google-ocr-with-python/

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016/Submissions/Introduction_to_OCR4WikiSource

Discussion with wikipedia developers on this.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120788

Google Vision API
https://cloud.google.com/vision

Explore the links

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-vision

http://terrenceryan.com/blog/index.php/working-with-cloud-vision-api-from-php/

https://github.com/thangman22/google-cloud-vision-php

http://blog.aimanbaharum.com/2016/04/21/ocr-with-google-cloud-vision-api/

 

5. FlipBoard like application for Tamil

Flipboard is a web, mobile app which gives latest content on user selected topics. Create such application for providing tamil content from web on various topics. Content contributors should give links for good articles with relevant categories, tags. Users should subscribe to categories and read the latest content.

 

6. Firefox plugin for tamil wikisource proofreading

 

Tamil wikisource is having around 2000 public domain ebooks, OCRed by google OCR. We have to proofread those books manually.

QuickWikiEditor is a Firefox plugin that enables on the page editing of wiki content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quickwikieditor/

Need to extend this plugin, to send the error words and the corrected words to a remote web application. From there, we can get the list of error words, search for them in entire ta.wikisource.org, replace with the corrected words automatically using bots.

Extend the plugin and create a web application to get the words collection from the plugin.

 

7. Fix the Tamil TTS by IITM

IIT Madras and SSN college, released a Text to speech application for Tamil, as an android application. You can get the source at
https://www.iitm.ac.in/donlab/tts/

It is very initial version. Not as good as the latest  web version available at http://speech.ssn.edu.in/

 

Still, we can learn, extend the initial version.

Explore the android app, get the C code out of it, create a command line app or web app as having the c code as backend.

 

8. Web application to add details about ebooks in a xml file, in github.

We release Tamil ebooks at FreeTamilEbooks.com

We store all the details about the books in a XML file.

Here is the file – https://github.com/kishorek/Free-Tamil-Ebooks/blob/master/booksdb.xml

This file is source for Android and iOS apps for FreeTamilebooks.

Once an ebook is released, we have to update the xml file manually, which is tough for non-tech contributors.

Need a web application to get the ebooks details in a form, then add those details in XML file and commits to the repo automatically.

 

9. Add ebooks automatically in GoodReads.com

We can add the details about the ebooks in FreeTamilebooks.com to GoodReads.com

We have to fill a long form manually.

See here how to do it. – http://www.wikihow.com/Add-a-New-Book-to-the-Goodreads-Database

Need a command line or web application to simplify this process or automate it for adding info about the books in FreeTamilEbooks.com

10. Build a SAAS version of planet kind of RSS aggregation software.

 

Most tech communities need a planet kind of RSS aggregation software. They have to buy a VPS, install planet software and add the RSS feeds.

It will be good, if we build a SAAS version of planet or similar software, so that they can simply sign in, add rss feeds and start using it.

Read more at https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/thinking-on-a-hosted-planet-solution-share-your-thoughts/

There are more ideas. Written them somewhere on my notebooks. Will collect them and share soon.

All the projects should be released as Free/Open Source software only.

If you are interested in doing any of the things said above, comment here.

email me to tshrinivasan AT gmail DOT com to know more details on any of the project.