Crowdsourcing and management of nature observational data

Abstract

Observations of plants and animals in nature is highly valued information for the experts in the area of biodiversity. They can be used to define changes in the population of animals, plants, or track their movements throughout long periods of time. Moreover, the richer the information following the observations, the more knowledge can be extracted from them. However, the limited number of experts and the limited funding in the area, makes the observation gathering procedure almost impossible. We present the design and implementation of a framework for the management of bio- diversity observations captured by users roaming in the nature. This aims to alleviate the need for experts capturing biodiversity information, and propagates the collection of information to simple users wandering in the nature. Our framework consists of a model supporting the observations, and an infrastructure that allows the capturing, enrichment and storage of the observations using state- of-the-art technologies. Our architecture provides a scalable, highly efficient management of the collected data. The collection of the observational data is performed in real-time using mobile de- vices that most of the people have available with them, like mobile phones and tablets. Additionally, we describe the meta-model that we have defined, allowing the personalization of the metadata that follow the observations. This provides our framework with the freedom and extensibility needed so as to be implemented for various domains other than biodiversity. Finally, we describe the process of migrating the data collected by the Natural Europe project to our infrastructure.