Social and Semantic Computing in Support of Citizen Science

No Thumbnail Available

Links to Files

https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/572/Social-and-Semantic-Computing-in-Support-of-Citizen-Science

Permanent Link

http://hdl.handle.net/11603/11990

Collections

UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department
UMBC Faculty Collection

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2011-08-05

Type of Work

conference papers and proceedings preprints
Text

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.

Subjects

Semantic Web
Social computing
Biodiversity informatics
Citizen science
Collaborative ontology development
UMBC Ebiquity Research Group

Abstract

We describe our ongoing work on using social media as a platform for citizen science. Building on our previous work of facilitating citizen science observations, and using RDF to integrate them with existing biodiversity knowledge, we are currently building Facebook Apps that will enable the reporting of observations, as well as the browsing and tagging of existing observations. The tagging capability serves two main purposes. First, it permits (and, we hope, encourages) multi-stage crowdsourcing for image identification. Second, it serves as a driver of ontology evolution, and permits experiments on potential working relationships between expert-engineered ontologies, and tagbased folksonomies.