The metadata attached to a dandiset determines how well the data can be found, cited, and credited. When a dandiset lists the paper it supports, a reader who finds the paper can find the data and a reader who finds the data can find the paper. When contributors carry ORCID identifiers, the dataset shows up on their ORCID records. When funders are linked to their ROR records with award numbers, program officers can trace the data their grants produced. When the subject field names brain regions and conditions from standard ontologies, the dandiset can be found by searching for those terms.
Many dandisets are missing some of this. It is common to find a dandiset whose description cites a paper that is not listed as a related resource, whose authors have no ORCIDs, whose funders are listed only by name, and whose subject field is empty. Most of these fields are optional at upload time, the paper often comes out after the data is shared, and looking up a dozen ORCIDs and ontology terms by hand is tedious work that is easy to put off.
The DANDI Metadata Editor
We maintain a metadata editor at medit.dandiarchive.org. It loads the draft version of any dandiset, shows its metadata in an editable view, and includes a checklist that scores the metadata on the items above: license, authors, ORCIDs, affiliations, funders, subject terms, keywords, a linked publication, and ethics approval. It also has an AI assistant that can look up papers, ORCIDs, ROR records, and ontology terms and propose edits. Every edit is held as a pending change and shown as an inline diff, and nothing is written to the archive until an owner commits it with their own API key.
The editor can also package a set of pending changes as a proposal link. The link carries the changes and a hash of the metadata they were computed against, and opening it loads the dandiset with the changes applied and highlighted. Anyone can make a proposal link, but only an owner can commit it. If the dandiset has been edited since the link was made, the hash no longer matches and the editor refuses to apply the changes.
Proposing Changes Across the Archive
Proposal links make it possible to do the tedious part of the work for owners and leave them the decision. We have built a pipeline that does this across the archive. It runs the editor’s checklist on every open dandiset and ranks them by how much of what is missing could be filled in from public sources. For each dandiset near the top of that list, an AI assistant (Claude) reads the metadata and searches OpenAlex, Crossref, ROR, ORCID, the EBI Ontology Lookup Service, the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, and the Cognitive Atlas for the missing information, then proposes a set of changes.
Those changes then pass through a set of checks written as ordinary code, separate from the AI. Every ORCID, ROR identifier, DOI, and ontology term in a proposal must have been returned by one of the lookups during that dandiset’s run, so an identifier the assistant invents or misremembers is rejected. A person can only be added as an author if they appear on a paper that is linked to the dandiset. Only structured fields may change: the title and description are never touched, existing contributors are never removed, and existing award numbers are left alone. A contact person is only proposed when the choice is unambiguous, for example when only one contributor has an email address; otherwise the email asks the owner to choose. The proposed metadata is validated against the DANDI schema and must not introduce any errors the draft did not already have. Proposals are capped at twelve changes so that the review stays short.
The pipeline builds the proposal link with the editor’s own hashing and diff code and drafts an email to the dandiset’s contact person. The email links to the dandiset, opens the editor with the proposed changes, lists each change in plain language, and explains the three steps to accept them: paste a DANDI API key into the editor, read through the highlighted changes and adjust or discard anything that looks wrong, and click commit. We read every draft before it is sent.
What It Found
The 75 proposals emailed so far suggest the following additions to the dandisets they cover:
| Change | Count |
|---|---|
| ORCIDs for existing contributors | 234 |
| Contributor affiliations linked to ROR | 157 |
| Funder entries with a ROR identifier | 141 |
| Subject terms from UBERON, the Cell Ontology, the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, disease ontologies, and the Cognitive Atlas | 135 |
| Related publications and preprints | 77 |
| Authors added from a linked paper, with ORCIDs | 32 |
The most valuable single change is usually the paper. Once the assistant finds the publication a dandiset supports, OpenAlex returns the authors’ ORCIDs and institutions and the funders and award numbers acknowledged in the paper, so one lookup fills in most of the rest.
Owners Stay in Control
The emails started going out today, and a few owners have already committed some or all of the suggested changes. Because the proposal only applies to the exact version of the metadata it was built from, an owner can edit freely before or after, and a link that has gone stale simply stops working. An owner who disagrees with a change can discard it in the editor before committing, and we would like to hear about anything the assistant got wrong so that we can fix it in the pipeline as well as in the dandiset.
If you own a dandiset and have not received one of these emails, you can get the same help directly. Open your dandiset in medit.dandiarchive.org, look at the checklist, and ask the assistant to fill in what is missing.