Getting involved

Important

EDAM is a community project: everyone is made to feel welcome and encouraged to get involved. The EDAM core developers have a limited capacity - we rely on your enthusiasm, contributions, and patience. Please help us build a better EDAM!

Mailing lists

To find the most efficient way to contribute to EDAM, to get help using EDAM for annotation and in software implementations, and for general discussions, e-mail:

edam@elixir-dk.org

We’ll make every effort to be responsive given our limited resources. We will work with you to find the most efficient way to proceed depending on your requirements, expertise, and bandwidth.

To post or receive mail from the list above, subscribe here:

http://elixirmail.cbs.dtu.dk/mailman/listinfo/edam

For low-traffic announcements, subscribe here:

http://elixirmail.cbs.dtu.dk/mailman/listinfo/edam-announce

Note

Most discussion occurs on the GitHub tracker!

Suggestions & requests

Suggestions for addition, corrections, and other improvements to EDAM are always welcome!

If you have a GitHub account, you can make suggestions and requests by opening a GitHub issue. We strongly recommend you get an account, if needed, - it only takes a minute! Our tracker includes templates for various types of suggestion:

  • Go to https://github.com/edamontology/edamontology/issues and click on “New issue”
  • If you’re not logged in, you’ll be asked first to log in or create an account
  • Click the “Get started” next to the type of request you want to make
  • Provide a title, and then follow instructions in the template, providing as much information as possible

Each template includes detailed instructions, which you’ll see when you create an issue, or you can read about them beforehand here.

If you can’t find the template you need, click “Open a regular issue” and provide concise information, but sufficiently detailed to be actionable.

When requesting new concepts, the bare-bones required information (common to all subontologies) is:

  • EDAM sub-ontology (Topic, Operation, Format, Data, Identifier)
  • term (the most common term used to refer to the concept)
  • short description (a couple of sentences)

More information will speed up the process, especially by including:

  • URL of suggested parent
  • exact synonyms (other commonly-used terms, acronyms etc. by which the concept is referred to)
  • narrow synonyms (terms reflecting specialisations of the concept. Narrow synonyms can be defined to avoid creating overly-specialised concepts.)

If it turns out you need a lot of new concepts, we can find a more efficient way (e.g. shared Google sheet), and you can join us as an EDAM Editor

Suggestions form

If you’re unwilling to get a GitHub account, then simple requests for one or a few changes can be made using this form:

http://tinyurl.com/EDAMChangeRequest

If you require many changes and additions, there’s probably a more efficient way to proceed: please contact edam@elixir-dk.org. You’ll need to subscribe to the list first.

Joining the team

We very much welcome you to join the EDAM team. Please first read about the Governance of EDAM to find the level that is right for you. Then mail edam-dev@elixir-dk.org to get started.

Hackathons

EDAM developers participate in regular events, which you are welcome to attend. For more details see https://bio.tools/events - or host your own event and invite the EDAM team!