The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is calling for public participation in its newly-established Citizen Science Domain Working Group (Citizen Science DWG).
Citizen Science is the process of involving the public in scientific research, usually by having them collect, collate, and/or analyze data. There is an increasingly large number of citizen science projects active around the world supporting research and decision-making on topics ranging from biodiversity conservation, to environmental regulation, to infrastructure evaluation and design.
As many citizen science projects are grassroots initiatives formed in response to local concerns, some duplication of the collected data is inevitable. However, for citizen science to have maximum impact on scientific research and public policy, data collected from local projects must also be re-usable on national and global scales – usually beyond the purpose for which they were originally collected.
The OGC Citizen Science DWG is motivated to support citizen science by providing a forum for demonstrating, and increasing the understanding of, the benefits brought by the use of open standards and best practices. The Citizen Science DWG will support the development of improved interoperability arrangements for the citizen science community.
An early work effort of the DWG will be to assess the results of the COBWEB program and consider future standards work.
The OGC is looking for interested parties to assist the Citizen Science DWG in achieving its goals. Details on the Citizen Science Domain Working Group can be found at: https://external.ogc.org/twiki_public/CitizenScienceDWG/DraftCharter. Interested parties can join the email list at: https://lists.opengeospatial.org/mailman/listinfo/citizen-science.dwg.
About the OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.
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