Citizen Science data interoperability

GIMA
M-GEO
M-SE
STAMP
Staff Involved
Topic description

Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and funding agencies and governments interested in the impact of citizen science initiatives. Having a common understanding and representation of citizen science projects, their participants, and their outcomes is key to enabling seamless knowledge and data sharing.

Tasks

In this project you will review current standards, which are related to citizen science, such as OGC (Simonis, I., & Atkinson, R. 2016), https://core.citizenscience.org/ (Lemmens et al. 2021), and its observations: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-ssn/ and https://www.ogc.org/standards/sensorthings. You will collect datasets from citizen science projects, such as SciStarter.org, CitSci.org, Atlas of Living Australia - BioCollect, & CitizenScience.gov and apply the standards for purpose of testing the interoperability between these datasets. You will develop a method which will identify levels of interoperability that can be attached to each dataset.

 

Topic objectives and methodology

To develop a method to describe interoperability levels for Citizen Science datasets

References for further reading
  • Lemmens R. et al. (2021) A Conceptual Model for Participants and Activities in Citizen Science Projects. In: Vohland K. et al. (eds) The Science of Citizen Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58278-4_9

    Simonis, I., & Atkinson, R. (2016) Standardized information models to optimize exchange, reusability and comparability of citizen science data. OGC Discussion Paper OGC 16-129. http://www.opengis.net/doc/DP/16-129