Standardized Information Models to Optimize Exchange, Reusability and Comparability of Citizen Science Data. A Specialization Approach

Abstract

The number of citizen science projects is constantly growing. Local, national, and international platforms feature new projects almost every month, resulting in an endless number of new observations that are constantly gathered and stored in databases. Often, these data sets are only used for the sampling campaign’s objectives, thus leaving a huge potential unused: its reusability in other contexts and its comparability with other data sets. Reusability and comparability require a number of aspects to be fulfilled. This paper describes those aspects and focuses on the citizen science application profile as a standardized information model to ensure syntactic and semantic understanding of citizen science data. Data compliant with this information model can be discovered and accessed through standardized Web interfaces and therefore easily integrated into any data processing environment or compared to any other data set. It is emphasized that the application profile described in this paper is one of two possible solutions that are currently being explored. The second one is briefly addressed and will be documented in detail in future publications.