COBWEB recently attended and presented at a two day workshop held by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission on January 27th-27th in Ispra (Italy). The workshop was attended by international experts discussing the uses of data and service infrastructures for Citizen Science. 

The participants were challenged to:

• identify the major requirements for Citizen Science project repositories and their relation to existing Citizen Science platforms; 

• draft a reference model for analysing and sharing Citizen Science tools and data – with first examples;

• define a high-level roadmap with checkpoints for synchronising already ongoing activities.

Chris Higgins presentation “COBWEB technology platform and future development needs” was well received with a great deal of discussion around how many of the issues addressed by COBWEB are central to the prospect of making citizen sources data useful. 

Particular interest was also shown in SWE4CitizenScience, the open respository (on GitHub) iniative headed by COBWEB to develop best practices on how to use Open Geospatial Consortium specifications for the Citizen Observatories projects.

View Chris Higgins presentation “COBWEB technology platform and future development needs” on SlideShare

Read more about SWE4CitizenScience and the open repository on GitHub

View other workshop presentations from this meeting on the JRC website.

This event followed the 2014 JRC-workshop on Citizen Science and Smart Cities (report available here), and the Citizen Science Data and Service Infrastructures Workshop that the JRC co-organised together with the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) at the end of October 2015 (more details here).