Social and Semantic Computing in Support of Citizen Science

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.