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

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

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement

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

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

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

The mass uptake of internet connected, GPS enabled mobile devices has resulted in a surge of citizens active in making a huge variety of environmental observations.  The use and reuse potential of these data is significant but currently compromised by a lack of interoperability.  Useable standards either don’t exist, are neglected, poorly understood or tooling is unavailable.  Large volumes of data are being created but exist in silos.  This is a complex problem requiring sophisticated solutions balanced with the need to present sometimes unsophisticated users with comprehensible and useable software.  COBWEB has addressed this challenge by using the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves as a testbed for researching and developing a generic crowdsourcing infrastructure platform for environmental monitoring.   The solution arrived at provides tools for the creation of mobile Applications which generate data compliant with open interoperability standards and facilitate integration with Spatial Data Infrastructures.  COBWEB is a research project and the components of the COBWEB platform are at different Technology Readiness Levels. This paper outlines how the overall solution was arrived at, describes the main components developed and points to quality assurance, integration of sensors, interoperability and associated standardisation as key areas requiring further attention.

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

2005): Quality of Service in a Global SDI

During the last years, a lot of effort was put into paving the path for interoperable geographic information (GI) web services that should overcome the disadvatages and infexibilities of monolithic GI systems. International standardization organizations like ISO or the Open Geospatial Consortium are working on specifications for self-describing GI web services that can be published, located, and invoked across a distributed computing platform, generally, the web. Dynamic cross-system and cross-organizational web service discovery and chaining at runtime allow the user to benefit from geographic data and geoprocessing functionalities that reside at different physical locations. Though a lot of technological obstacles still remain unsolved, GI web services will soon emerge to the state of the art technology in distributed geocomputing. The day the web service technology will become commonplace, GI web services will proliferate and according to Mani and Nagarajan, quality of service will become a significant factor in distinguishing the success of service providers. This paper deals with chosen issues of quality of service with regard to interoperable GI web services. Taking a rather distant point of view, the paper aims at presenting the results of a quality of service experiment that has been conducted at the University of Muenster during the GDI North-Rhine Westphalia joint project 2004. It shall broaden the view upon quality of service aspects within a global SDI

Blending in GI e-learning environments: The role of standardized web services

This article will discuss the different view of learning and teaching within the subject of Geoinformatics. On the basis of the e-learning environment geoinformation.net, the different views of problem oriented teaching will be described and illustrated with their realisation in this specific platform. The article will end with some remarks which research areas should be addressed in future while trying to improve complex online and blended learning environments. Different views of learning and teaching Essentially, we differentiate two central views of learning and teaching: the traditional and the constructivist approach. The traditional approach is mainly based on class teaching. Based on the opinion that teaching has to focus on the content that has to be transferred, this approach tries to teach systematic knowledge with very few tangible references to real world issues. The teacher processes and edits the content in a way that the student will be able to digest the knowledge and will be enabled to put it in use essentially. At the end of this knowledge transport, the student is supposed to have the same knowledge available like the teacher. The centre of the traditional teaching philosophy is taken by the instruction: The teacher takes th

SENSOR WEBS: A ROADMAP

Networks of sensors – interacting autonomously within its predefined conditions – are still a far vision of the new efforts called Sensor Web. The heterogeneity of sensor types, data formats, and communication protocols had lead to various distinct systems with very little interoperability in between. New efforts driven by the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) community address those problems and provide interesting solution approaches. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative by the Open Geospatial Consortium aims at standardizing the entire sensor web process of sensor description, sensor discovery, sensor tasking, and access of data observed by sensors. This article will illustrate two important standing legs of current developments towards interoperable sensor webs: First the research questions addressed by research institutes and standardizing consortia, and second by open source software initiatives like 52north that help to bundle developer capacities and therefore accelerate the entire process to set up interoperable sensor webs, which are – despite all efforts – still in its infancy

Integrating Knowledge Bases into SDI’s

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) define a framework that allows on-line access to distributed geographic data and geoprocessing functionalities, though only very few standardized processing capabilities are yet usable. For the modeler, providing a sophisticated application in form of a web service using interoperable frameworks means that he has to be in expert not only in his knowledge domain but in web service orchestration and chaining additionally. Simple questions with answers based on integrated sensor results, like “do I have smog at location x ” have to be modeled using GIS techniques before being publishable as a web service. This paper prepares the ground for integrating expert systems that are based on autonomous sensor networks into spatial data infrastructures and frees the expert of the burden of in-depth knowledge of service coupling and managing. Most of the geoprocessing capabilities will be part of the – the expert system wrapping – service. Chaining and orchestration will be mostly performed by the backward chaining system of the inference machine