Citizen OBservatory WEB (COBWEB): A Generic Infrastructure Platform to Facilitate the Collection of Citizen Science Data for Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

COBWEB has used the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves as a testbed for researching and developing a generic crowdsourcing infrastructure platform for environmental monitoring. A major challenge is dealing with what is necessarily a complex problem requiring sophisticated solutions balanced with the need to present sometimes unsophisticated users with comprehensible and useable software. The components of the COBWEB platform are at different Technology Readiness Levels. This short paper outlines the overall solution and points to quality assurance, standardisation and semantic interoperability as key areas requiring further attention.