COBWEB will be attending and chairing a workshop at the first European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) conference being held in Berlin this May 19th-21st. The ECSA conference aims at policy makers, science funders, scientists, practitioners in the field of citizen science, non-governmental organisations, and interested citizens. A trans-disciplinary conference, it will highlight, demonstrate and debate the innovation potential of citizen science for science, society and policy, and its role within open science and innovation.

COBWEB’s workshop ‘Data, metadata, quality and visualisation of citizen science data’ will be chaired by Dr Jamie Williams CSci (Environment Systems, UK), with Dr Suvodeep Mazumdar (University of Sheffield, UK), and Dr Arne J. Berre (SINTEF, Norway). 

The session will focus on “Tools, technologies and applications in Citizen Science” from the user perspective – with a focus on acquisition of observation data through sensors and apps. Taking into consideration the observations themselves and how they are stored, shared, processed and visualised. This session will discuss various elements of data, metadata, quality and visualisation of citizen science data.

A panel discussion will focus on these challenges and opportunities with the participation of the audience. A set of questions can be posted (via Twitter with a pre-determined hashtag) to the panel while the session is ongoing, which will also be included in the panel discussions.

More information on the workshop is provided on our events page: https://cobwebproject.eu/events/cobweb-workshop-ecsa-conference 

More information on ECSA and the conference can be found at http://www.ecsa2016.eu

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).

 

 

The COBWEB website has been revitalised with new content and a fresh new look. With new content on our co-design projects, SWE4CitizenScience, and the Biosphere Reserves, there’s a wealth of new information about who we are and what COBWEB is all about. Check out the website and tell us what you think!

 2015 was a busy time for COBWEB:

September: COWEB attended the Wales Biodiversity Partnership conference and ran a workshop introducing delegates to the COBWEB project. Delegates were shown how to set up their own ‘citizen science’ survey to collect data, searched for butterflies around the Aberystwyth University Campus and recorded their observations on a mobile phone. More on this in our Newsletter out later this month.

October: COBWEB’s Inigo Simonis presented on SWE4CitizenScience (include link) European Citizen Science General Assembly (ECSA) in Barcelona .

November:  COBWEB attended Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Week in Mexico City. During GEO week Jamie Williams (Environment Systems) presented COBWEB in Open Geospatial Consortium and JRC’s a joint session on “apps for GEO”. 

COBWEB’s Chris Higgins (EDINA) and Jamie Williams (Environment Systems) with the Norwegian delegation to Mexico.

December: COWBEB’s Andreas Matheus (SECD) flew to Sydney for the Open Geospatial Consortium and presented on SWE4CitizenScience at the Citizens Observatory Ad hoc.

We also attended the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in Edinburgh where the enthusiasm of delegates about our COBWEB project and how it could be implemented in the field was electric.

 

As we enter the fourth year of our project we’d like to welcome those of you who are joining this news list for the first time. We’d also like to thank those of you who have been following us from the start for your continued engagement and participation in our project.

This is shaping up to be an exciting year for COBWEB. We will be announcing all updates and events via our news feed to keep you all thoroughly up to date.

Happy 2016!