By Sven Schade, Anne Bowser, and Russell Scarpino
With the growth of citizen science comes the challenge of coordinating people, projects, and data. But these challenges also present a tremendous opportunity – with proper standardization, data can support multiple projects, allowing citizen science to address ever-grander issues and problems.
The U.S. Citizen Science Association (CSA) recently founded a Data and Metadata Working Group to promote collaboration in citizen science through development and/or improvement of international standards for data and metadata. To support, advance, and facilitate interoperability, the working group supports the standardization of:
- Project metadata, which describes different types of citizen science activities. For example, one type of project metadata could be the intended outcomes of a certain citizen science project.
- Observational metadata, which describes the data collected through citizen science activities. One type of observational metadata could be the location where a data point was collected.
This project is a collaboration between the CSA, the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), and other organizations. On Jan. 26-27, 2016, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center invited 20 international participants, including members of the three associations, to Ispra, Italy for a two-day workshop to discuss data and service infrastructures for citizen science. Continue reading “Data and Metadata in Italy: Reporting from the Citizen Science Data and Service Infrastructure Meeting”