COBWEB recently attended the joint INSPIRE 2015 and Geospatial World Forum conference, one of the biggest geospatial events in Europe. Representatives from the COBWEB consortium, including OGC, GeoCat, the University of Nottingham and EDINA, travelled to Lisbon in Portugal for the event in May. Some 1,500 participants listened to over 300 speakers around geospatial developments like 3D, open data, earth observation, crowdsourcing, marine, open source, environment, interoperability, business models etc. Results of COBWEB were presented in the Open Source track and at a workshop around the FP7 citizen observatories projects.

At the Open Source Track, Paul van Genuchten from GeoCat presented some of GeoCat’s work on COBWEB related to the recent release of GeoNetwork 3.0, which is the main component in the COBWEB portal. Other components of the Open Source ‘Citizen Science Stack’ were also mentioned.

A dedicated citizen science workshop introduced by Jose-Miguel Rubio-Iglesias from the European Commission, brought together representatives from four citizen observatory projects, Citi-Sense, We-Sense-It, CitClops and COBWEB. The workshop started with a summary on the goals of the citizen observatories program. Next, the apps and sensors developed as part of the projects were demonstrated. Following this, the apps and sensors were taken outdoors to test them around the venue. In a closing session the results from the session were presented on the portals developed for each of the projects and discussion started on the alignment of the capture protocols used in the various projects.

Each of the projects have focussed on a certain aspect of a citizen observatory. Bringing the results of each of these projects together in a citizen science bundle could lead to a best practice for citizen science.