Citizen Science at SciBarCamp II: Semantic Eco-Blogging!

At the last SciBarCamp, Joel Sachs from the SPIRE team at university of Maryland presented a very inspiring project that opens environmental/bioscience in a way that enables regular people to get involved usefully.

First, a bit of background. Every living species has a certain geographic distribution that is known to evolve over time, especially in recent years due to global warming. This data is extremely useful for environment scientists. As you might expect, though, comprehensively cataloging which species live where is a monumental undertaking, especially if you have to repeat the effort every year!

Now, most people nowadays have digital cameras and internet access. Some gadget freaks actually have both, plus a global positioning system (GPS), all in a neat package, which makes it ultra-easy for them to go out in the woods and snap pictures of plants and animals around them. Special days called BioBlitzes have emerged recently where many people go out all at the same time but in different locations, to do just that. Then they report what they found on their respective blogs.

So where and how does it feed into science? Well, Sach's project provides Spotter, a Firefox extension, and a spreadsheet-to-RDF utility called RDF123, that together enable participants to easily do all of the following:

• Snap a picture of a specimen;
  
• Upload it to Flickr;
• Provide geographic information on where the photo was taken;
• Tag it with descriptive terms, as specifically as they can;
• If needed, request further crowdsourced identification (volunteers can watch RSS streams corresponding to certain tags like "bird" or "butterfly").

Faithful readers of mine (who have good memory!) will recognize this as a neat incarnation of that old structured blogging idea. The result of each contribution is stored in the RDF representation on a central aggregating database managed by SPIRE. This enables semantic queries to be made, such as: "Show all observations of species that are classified as being of concern by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service" or "What was the northernmost spotting of the Emerald Ash Borer last year?".

The overall result is obviously a global, collaborative database of samples from everywhere that gets richer with each participant's contribution. For participants, obvious motivations include:

• an interest in natural observation (think about birdwatchers);
• the satisfaction of contributing to a worthwhile scientific endeavor;
• the pride of offering something quite unique (info sampled at your particular location).

I could totally picture 6th grade classes going out and having a blast doing this. (If you're an educator reading this, think about doing it!)

So far there are about 1200 observations in the system, but hopefully this number will grow as more people join the effort. I don't know too much about the viral properties of participation, but for starters, the fact that photos are posted into each people's Flickr stream exposes the project to their friends.

All in all, I think this is a very promising effort that exemplifies how amateurs and pros can complement each other given the right tools. There are obvious parallels to draw between this effort and other citizen science endeavors such as GalaxyZoo, which harnesses people's ability to classify galaxies better than computers, or the OpenStreetMap project, which aims to create free datasets of where streets are everywhere in the world.