ECSA Conference 2024 – WorkshopA common way of monitoring near real-time change of environmental data with the OGC’s STAplus

Many citizen science projects regularly collect data about the environment. However, monitoring the change by combining different data citizen science projects is still extremely difficult. When the data is shared on the Internet, there are often technical interoperability issues and shortcomings of operational web APIs as they are commonly custom-designed to serve their own application(s). For continuous monitoring of the overall change, it is necessary to arrange some API interoperability, a common data model, and agreed semantics. In addition, a mechanism to be able to receive change notifications is rarely implemented. Notifications allow for implementing alerts, which are useful in cases such as reaching dangerous air quality conditions, forest fire detection, endangered species tracking, etc. STAplus is an API that supports pushing notifications to previously subscribed applications to notify users.

Inspired by the CitiObs, AD4GD and More4Nature projects application of STAplus for dealing with aspects necessary for citizen science (citizen attribution, licensing, semantic definition, campaigns, etc), the workshop will: a) Illustrate near real time capture of air quality data using the Smart Citizen Kit. b) Explore how to apply the STAplus data model in existing citizen science initiatives. c) Show the potential of rich data queries including geo-fencing illustrating performance and interoperable reuse across projects. d) Showcase how tools can produce rich queries in an intuitive fashion. e) Generating alerts when unacceptable thresholds have been surpassed. f) Demonstrating attribution and recognition of citizen scientists contributions. g) Protecting private and sensitive information. The outcome of the workshop will serve as an input for next sessions of the “Projects, data, tools and technology” ECSA working group.

The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) Conference is one of the leading citizen science events in Europe where citizen science practitioners, researchers, activists, scientists, policymakers, artists, and more discuss and network. This year’s focus is set on the motto ‘Change’ and the goal is to address different approaches to change from all kinds of perspectives within the realm of citizen science and participatory research, discuss both active, transformative change, and the observation of change monitored by citizen science in all kinds of disciplines and highlight the potential of citizen science to be a change maker in research and society, and as a tool to manage the change happening around us.