Those interested in the technologies and standards-based approaches used by COBWEB will be interested to hear that last week Bart De Lathouwer, from COBWEB partner OGC, attended the ENVIP-2013 (Environmental Information Systems and Services – Infrastructures and Platforms 2013) workshop, part of ISESS 2013 – the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (9th – 11th October 2013) in Neusiedl am See, Austria. 

Bart gave a presentation on COBWEB and chaired the session “ENVIP 2013 for Citizens Observatories and crowd sourcing” on  Thursday 10th October. The day included a number of interesting presentations from other European projects including:

Thomas Usländer’s presentation, “SERVUS – Collaborative Tool Support for Agile Requirements Analysis”, which talked about a design methodology for semi-structured use case descriptions in geospatial-orientated projects. You can read about this methodology in Uslander, Junker and Pfarr (2011). 

Jan van Oort and Denis Havlik’s presentation on the “Ubicity framework for crowd sourcing and crowd tasking”, which is associated with the ENVIROFI initiative, talked about task-based crowdsourcing – the idea of giving participants a specific contained task to complete rather than asking them to gather broader types or formats of data. 

The day also included updates on ENVIROFI (the Environmental Observation Web and its Service Applications within the Future Internet) and the FI-PPP (Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership) programmes. 

Other projects presented included:

• NRG4CAST, which is looking at real-time energy forecasting in smart cities
• SUDPlan, a web-based planning, prediction and training tool to support decisions in long term urban planning
• EnviroCar, which captures car data (speed, engine parameters) to map pollution and noise emissions in a city
• CITI-SENSE, which is developing a sensor-based citizens’ observatory community for improving quality of life in cities. 

Bart’s own presentation on COBWEB gave an overview of the project and particularly talked about COBWEB’s Access Management Federation. It was well received with interesting questions raised around authentication and trust. 

Other European projects working in similar areas to COBWEB may want to take a look at  “Environmental Infrastructures and Platforms with Citizens Observations and Linked Open Data” (Berre, Schade and Roman 2013) which looks at ENVIP’s work to date, looking at common building blocks emerging from research projects concerned with environmental information. ENVIP is currently particularly following citizens observatories and linked open data, two key emerging trends. The authors encourage interested parties and project consortia to provide contributions for future analysis through the ENVIP initiative and the CEN/TC287 best practices registry.