WP3 Citizen Engagement & integration of data from citizen science

This task aims to provide, by the end of the project, a sustainable context, regarding the citizen’s involvement. Citizens should engage longer-term beyond project duration, to provide meaningful inputs and exchange in the long term about their new needs. In order to ensure such sustainability, the partners involved in Task 3.1 with WP10 will provide means for citizens to express their needs, as well as training material and sessions, so that from the beginning of the project, citizens entirely use the project’s background and outcomes. Partners will provide support, framework and training to ensure ongoing citizen engagement by mapping and addressing citizen needs across the very diverse stakeholder groups and different apps. To ensure citizen scientists receive satisfactory support and room to express needs, communication channels will be designed and opened via social networks, public and private groups. A survey for eliciting requirements of citizens as stakeholders will be drafted and implemented, ensuring contribution in the long run beyond project duration.

• Duration:  M1 - M36
• Task Lead:  University of Haifa (UoH)

This task is to engage citizens as volunteer stakeholders of the project to ensure a participatory approach throughout the project. To do so, DTO apps that provide meaningful, practical content and solutions will be identified in terms of requirements and developed. Through this task, partners will recruit and train volunteers for the data collection and data annotation activities. The consortium will organise short courses to train contributors to data acquisition and public events are also foreseen in order to recruit volunteers. In addition workshop and seminars will be carried out to train volunteers engaged in the data refinement, tagging, and annotation process. We will perform an extensive survey across European Seas to identify Citizen Science apps that can meet DTO standards. The respective stakeholder groups for these apps will be singled out and approached to facilitate Iliad implementation. Collaborating with project scientists, Data acquisition, training, workshops, and engagement sessions will be streamlined according to state-of-the-art Citizen Science methodology. Coordinated with and supported by WP10.

• Duration:  M4 - M36
• Task Lead:  University of Haifa (UoH)

In close consultation with WP1 and Task 3.2, Task 3.3 will provide marketing material for citizen engagement with the aim to scale-up the data collection and data annotation activities and advertise these using the Iliad Bazaar Citizen Science apps shelve of the Iliad MarketPlace. we will use the Iliad bazaar as an interface to articulate citizen’s needs and match them against existing or new (desired) solutions. Hackathons will be organised to engage software developers and citizens to co-create new citizen science applications and produce solutions underpinning environmental management, governance and protection of the seas. Novel technologies (novel data visualisations, UIX optimisation to prevent interview fatigue, situational-awareness with the use of smartphone sensory data, in-App analytics using edgeAI techniques…) will be used to accelerate this co-creation process.

• Duration:  M7 - M36
• Task Lead:  Ramani B.V (RAMANI)

In this task we will identify existing standards for Volunteered Citizen Science data and aim to identify and recycle existing ontologies and semantically enriched software architectures. We will define the Core Citizen science Iliad ontology and publish it as a standard for maritime citizen sciences apps, building on existing standards. This will be made accessible using native Android and iOS SDKs as well as Open-Linked Data RESTful services in order to ensure the openness, discoverability, and replicability between already existing apps and the ones developed under this project. This will enable observations made through several citizen apps, across many different locations using different languages, to be shared. It will enable reasoning and making inferences on all available data for further alerting and forecasting functions and exchanging it between and across the other project databases. We will work in close collaboration with Citizen Science domain working group, led by WeObserve, the Citizen Science community in GEO and the Projects, data, tools and technology working group in ECSA. We will use the OGC definition service to store the relevant common vocabularies for combining data from different citizen science projects and the integration with other official data sources. This work will take the Essential Ocean Variables developed in the GEOWoW project as the starting point for the vocabularies of the observations that Citizen Science activities and will evolve with the new needs.

• Duration:  M7 - M18
• Task Lead:  Ramani B.V (RAMANI)

From the apps point of view, this task will use the software framework developed in Task 3.4 and adapt mobile phone apps dedicated to the support of the data collection campaigns. For instance, a new mobile app that will provide notifications and alarms to fishers and ship navigators for fast changes in weather conditions will be developed. Amongst others, we will assess the following CS App endeavours: (1) Meduzot Baam: Mobile app with a web community and a social networking platform, (2) OPECS: Oil Pollution Estimation using Citizen Science, (3) CLEANmeUP! Marine debris: cleaning beaches using Citizen Science, (4) FishQUAL: Crowdsourcing Fish quality using edge-AI with a mobile app, (5) SAFEcoasts: Coastal swimming safety: mapping beach safety for swimmers, (6) WAVEme: Retrieval of physical ocean conditions, wave height and wave width. From the back-end point of view, we will develop the analysis functions for citizen science that will be highlighted in Task 3.1, according to citizen needs. The aim is to provide Iliad with analysis and early warning capabilities. Among others, we will provide means to integrate information coming from the different sources (citizen apps, social media, open sources, online encyclopaedia and resources …) into a single a coherent view in which redundancy between sources will be eliminated and where each specific information source will bring its own view on the ocean that will be integrated in the overall picture. Robust statistical models of the climatic conditions will be developed. These models will be integrated into the TUV's simulators and the Iliad DTO. NIMH will provide their expertise in cheap & energy-efficient devices, which can gather data and communicate with others in the mesh of devices to develop a network of sensors managed by citizens. A Semantic Information Analysis function will be developed, relying on the InSyTo and COST Citizen Sciences toolbox provided by THALES and Ramani.

• Duration:  M7 - M18
• Task Lead:  Thales (THALES)