Co-designed Citizen Observatories Services for the EOS Cloud

Developing interoperable components to support Citizen Science projects via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

COS4CLOUD (Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS Cloud) aims to design, prototype and implement services that address the Open Science challenges shared by citizen observatories active in the fields of biodiversity and environmental quality monitoring. To support citizen observatories, project work focuses on the development of services that help improve the data and information quality. Technologies for this include deep machine learning, automatic video recognition, advanced mobile app interfaces, and other cutting-edge technologies, based on data models and data protocols validated by traditional science. The new services will provide mechanisms to ensure the visibility and recognition of data contributors and tools to improve networking between various stakeholders. Novel innovative digital services will be developed through the integration of Citizen Science products generated by different providers. The services will be implemented according to open standards to ensure their interoperability. The European Open Science Cloud hub provides an agile, fit-for-purpose and sustainable site, including a discovery service, to both traditional and citizen scientists.

The design of new services will be user oriented and engage a wide range of stakeholders in society, government, industry, academia, agencies, and research to co-design service requirements. As a result, COS4CLOUD will integrate Citizen Science in the European Open Science Cloud, bringing Citizen Science projects as a service to the scientific community and society at large.

52°North’s major contributions will be the architecture definition and the development of interoperability standards, profiles and best practices. Furthermore, 52°North will lead the definition of an agile development methodology for the project. Other contributions include work on interoperability, conformance and performance testing
activities as well as the evaluation of technology readiness levels. Finally, 52°North will support networking, dissemination and international standardization activities.

Since the project started in November 2019, 52°North’s activities were focused on project initialization. 52°North also worked on an agile, software development strategy and contributed to the second phase of the OGC Citizen Science Interoperability Experiment. The OGC CitSciIE will deliver input concerning the interoperable handling of Citizen Science data.