by Sven Schade

The Friday after the ECSA General Assembly, approximately 40 participants continued their discussions on Citizen Science Data and Service Infrastructures in a half-day workshop. Members of the ECSA Working Group Data, Tools and Technology, Environmental Information Systems and Services – Infrastructures and Platforms (ENVIP) 2015 and the CSA working group on Citizen Science project metadata standardization elaborated a common understanding on the services and technologies they would like to make available to the Citizen Science community. The final goal was to define a conceptual model for enabling interoperability between these services and technologies.

Workshop Agenda
10:00-10:10 Welcome
10:10-10:30 Summary of the conclusions from the Working Group session on Thursday. Jaume Piera
10:30-11:00 Lightning Talks
– Citizen Observatories: examples of architectures and platforms, including CITI-SENSE. Arne J. Berre
– Data interpretation and knowledge-based systems integration. Alexander Steblin
– SWE Sensor Web profile for Citizens Science. Ingo Simonis
– Biodiversity records. Veljo Runnel
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-13:15 Discussion in plenary and in groups to extend the results from the Thursday workshop and elaborate a Roadmap
13:15-13:30 Wrap up and Closing

The meeting was highly positive and constructive. The need for data and service sustainability was matched with a request for a robust and flexible architectural setting. The participants began to map out the already available reference models (esp. the European Interoperability Framework – EIF and the ISO TC211 19119 Service Architecture model) and found editors for collecting relevant material and providing synthesis reports from a literature and project review on core elements. It has been particularly requested to develop material that informs practitioners and members of the citizen science community with little or no technical background.

Most of the identified work items will be carried out by the Data Tools & Technology Working Group of ECSA, together with colleagues from the US and Australia. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission agreed to support these development from the JRC point of view in order to well reflect their interests and needs for interoperability. A roadmap for the desired activities was drafted and next milestones could be defined for mid-January and May 2016 (also for actions at the ECSA conference).Now, the required technical and organizational settings are initiated, work on the content of the reference model has been framed, and community members are invited to join these activities.

If you are interested in contributing to these activities, please contact Jaume Piera, Chair of the Data Tools & Technology Working Group of ECSA, Sven Schade from JRC, or Anne Bowser from the Wilson Center Commons Lab.

You can also read a report on the workshop on Muki Haklay’s blog.