Towards a new ontology of Citizen Science

On 27-28 March, the University of Novi Sad (Serbia) and 1000001 Labs hosted a workshop to develop an ontology of citizen science projects to support data sharing among them.

The workshop was organized for Working Group (WG) 5 of COST Action 15212. This Working Group is dedicated to ‘Improving data standardization and interoperability’. The COST Action is dedicated to ‘Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe’.

One goal of the COST Action is to help create an ontology (including a vocabulary) for describing citizen-science projects, observations and analyses, building upon prior research and existing standards, which any organization can model their database structure upon.

Joan Masó from CREAF – who is also a partner in the Ground Truth 2.0 project – presented the state of standardization efforts around citizen science in OGC.

Highlights from the workshop:

  • Contributions to the analysis of the file “PPSR – Core project metadata mapping – multiple standards” have been presented.
  • A decision was made to focus effort first on project metadata and then on observational & analysis data
  • The project metadata scheme has been improved, adding to the initial list of concepts
  • Lively discussion on what core and non-core attributes are

Press here for the full meeting minutes!

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