20 May 2014 -- AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe) and  COBWEB (Citizen OBservatory WEB, an EU FP7 Project) invite public participation in a special workshop on crowdsourced data and the environment.  The AGILE & COBWEB Workshop - "Citizen Science, Quality and Standards" will be held June 3, 2014 in Castellón, Spain in conjunction with the AGILE 2014 conference.

Crowdsourced data (“people as sensors” recording real-time observations and measurements) are a valuable source of scientific and policy-making information when enhanced with an indication of quality and fused with authoritative data. This workshop seeks to engage the scientific community in discussions about the use of quality controlled crowdsourced environmental data.

 

The infrastructure being developed within COBWEB exploits technological developments in ubiquitous mobile devices. It also exploits and contributes to developments in the operational standards that are used widely in public spatial data infrastructures and also increasingly used in science. COBWEB infrastructure is being designed to enable citizens living within Biosphere Reserves to collect environmental information on a range of parameters including species distribution, flooding and land cover/use. The main driver is the value that can result when citizens participate in environmental governance. It is anticipated that COBWEB work products will be useful in similar activities around the world.

 

To maximize impact, COBWEB is working with standards organizations. Specifically, COBWEB will aim to improve the usability of OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards and the OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard with mobile devices, develop widespread acceptance of the data quality approach developed and maximize the applications potential of COBWEB outputs.

 

Details, agenda and call for brief presentations are available at:  http://bit.ly/RoYRT6 

 

Mike Jackson, University of Nottingham, 

 

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/.