Abstract
This editorial introduces the special issue entitled “Geoinformatics in Citizen Science” of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. The issue includes papers dealing with three main topics. (1) Key tasks of citizen science (CS) in leveraging geoinformatics. This comprises descriptions of citizen science initiatives where geoinformation management and processing is the key means for discovering new knowledge, and it includes: (i) “hackAIR: Towards Raising Awareness about Air Quality in Europe by Developing a Collective Online Platform” by Kosmidis et al., (ii) “Coupling Traditional Monitoring and Citizen Science to Disentangle the Invasion of Halyomorpha halys” by Malek et al., and (iii) “Increasing the Accuracy of Crowdsourced Information on Land Cover via a Voting Procedure Weighted by Information Inferred from the Contributed Data” by Foody et al. (2) Evaluations of approaches to handle geoinformation in CS. This examines citizen science initiatives which critically analyze approaches to acquire and handle geoinformation, and it includes: (iv) “CS Projects Involving Geoinformatics: A Survey of Implementation Approaches” by Criscuolo et al., (v) “Obstacles and Opportunities of Using a Mobile App for Marine Mammal Research” by Hann et al., (vi) “OSM Data Import as an Outreach Tool to Trigger Community Growth? A Case Study in Miami” by Juhász and Hochmair, and (vii) “Experiences with Citizen-Sourced VGI in Challenging Circumstances“ by Hameed et al. (3) Novel geoinformatics research issues: (viii) “A New Method for the Assessment of Spatial Accuracy and Completeness of OpenStreetMap Building Footprints” by Brovelli and Zamboni, (ix) “A Citizen Science Approach for Collecting Toponyms” by Perdana and Ostermann, and (x) “An Automatic User Grouping Model for a Group Recommender System in Location-Based Social Networks” by Khazaei and Alimohammadi.
Highlights
The idea of editing this special issue was motivated by the observation of the increasing number of academic papers focused on the characteristics of volunteered geographic information (VGI) and crowdsourced geoinformation within citizen science (CS) projects, and on evaluations of the potential for VGI to help scientists, policy makers, and business companies in conceiving and launching new scientific projects [1–8]
We examine descriptions of CS initiatives where geoinformation management and processing are the key means needed for pursuing the objectives of the CS projects
Technological glitches and participant retention added additional insight. (vi) “OSM Data Import as an Outreach Tool to Trigger Community Growth? A Case Study in Miami” by Juhász and Hochmair presents the results of a study that explored if and how an OpenStreetMap (OSM) data import tool can contribute to OSM community growth
Summary
The idea of editing this special issue was motivated by the observation of the increasing number of academic papers focused on the characteristics of volunteered geographic information (VGI) and crowdsourced geoinformation within citizen science (CS) projects, and on evaluations of the potential for VGI to help scientists, policy makers, and business companies in conceiving and launching new scientific projects [1–8]. VGI and crowdsourced geoinformation from social networks are being investigated as a novel opportunity to launch research projects with widespread ground data, including monitoring of natural, environmental, human-driven, and social changes and events. The vast literature describing CS initiatives do not focus on the geoinformatics algorithms and technologies applied in relation to the activities and tasks of the projects This may be due to the fact that the community of researchers in CS is generally very heterogeneous, spanning from experts in various CS application domains, to social scientists studying crowd participation and volunteers’ characteristics, and to computer scientists who are often involved in CS activities as mere executors and implementers of solutions. The objectives of this special issue were to overview the latest geoinformation processing approaches used in CS initiatives to investigate CS activities and tasks that can benefit from the analysis of geoinformation, to envisage ongoing technological solutions and trends for geoinformatics in CS, and to outline problems and unsolved issues
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