Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science and INSPIRE
The INSPIRE 2014 conference marks the middle of the implementation process of the INSPIRE directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community). The directive is aimed at establishing a pan-European Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), and that mean lots of blueprints, pipes, machine rooms and protocols for enabling the sharing of geographic information. In GIS jargon, blueprints translate to metadata which is a standardise way to describe a GIS dataset; pipes and machine rooms translate to data portals and servers, and the protocols translate to web services that use known standards (here you’ll have a real acronym soup of WMS, WCS, WFS and OGC). It is all aimed to allow people across Europe to share data in an efficient way so data can be found and used. In principle, at least!
This is the stuff of governmental organisations that are producing the data (national mapping agencies, government offices, statistical offices etc.) and the whole INSPIRE language and aims are targeted at the producers of the information, encouraging them to publish information about their data and share it with others. A domain of well established bureaucracies (in the positive sense of the word) and organisations that are following internal procedure in producing, quality checking and distributing their information products. At first sight, seem like the opposite world of ‘upscience‘ where sometime there are only ad-hoc structures and activities.
That is why providing a talk in the plenary session that was dedicated to Governance and Information, and aimed to “assess how INSPIRE is contributing to a more effective and participated environmental policy in Europe, and how it provides connectivity with other policies affecting our environment, society, and the economy” was of concern. So where are the meeting points of INSPIRE and citizen science?
One option, is to try a top-down approach and force those who collect data to provide it in INSPIRE compliant way. Of course this is destined to fail. So the next option is to force the intermediaries to do the translation – and projects such as COBWEB is doing that, although it remain to be seen what compromises will be needed. Finally, there is an option to adapt and change procedures such as INSPIRE to reflect the change in the way the world works.
To prepare the talk, I teamed with Dr Claire Ellul, who specialises in metadata (among many other things) and knows about INSPIRE more than me.
The talk started with my previous work about the three eras of environmental information, noticing the move from data by experts, and for experts (1969-1992) to by experts & the public, for experts & the public (2012 on)
As the diagrams show, a major challenges of INSPIRE is that it is a regulation that was created on the basis of the “first era” and “second era” and it inherently assumes stable institutional practices in creating and disseminating and sharing environmental information.
Alas, the world has changed – and one particular moment of change is August 2004 when OpenStreetMap started, so by the time INSPIRE came into force, crowdsourced geographic information and citizen science became legitimate part of the landscape. These data sources are coming from a completely different paradigm of production and management, and now, with 10 years of experience in OSM and growing understanding of citizen science data, we can notice the differences in production, organisation and practices. For example, while being very viable source of geographic information, OSM still doesn’t have an office and ‘someone to call’.
Furthermore, data quality methods also require different framing for these data. We have metadata standards and quality standards that are assuming the second era, but we need to find ways to integrate into sharing frameworks like INSPIRE the messy, noisy but also rich and important data from citizen science and crowdsourcing.
Claire provided a case study that analyses the challenges in the area of metadata in particular. The case looks at different noise mapping sources and how the can be understood. Her analysis demonstrates how the ‘producer centric’ focus of INSPIRE is challenging when trying to create systems that record and use metadata for crowdsourced information. The case study is based on our own experiences over the past 6 years and in different projects, so there is information that is explicit in the map, some in a documentation – but some that is only hidden (e.g. calibration and quality of smart phone apps).
We conclude with the message that the INSPIRE community need to start noticing these sources of data and consider how they can be integrated in the overall infrastructure.
The slides from the talk are provided below.
