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Lisp Data Manipulation and Description Language
Define a Common Lisp library that could be used to import/export and manipulate "data". Think about the various CSV utilities floating around and the facilities offered by R, Matlab et similia to read and write data. Turns out there is quite a bit of code doing this sort of things, and could coalesce it into something much more organic and portable.
There are several architectural issues to be takled. E.g. how and when you transform this data to CL arrays and when and how you connect to and from a SQL source. Also, what do you do when your file does not really fit in memory? SAS and SPSS have nice tricks to deal with this issue. R does not.
Of course a lot of background and literature study would be necessary, but I think this would be quite a nice addenda to the CL world.
Requires knowledge of various data bases and import/export subsystems in several other systems and ability to write effective specifications
