The theme
The “VGI & Citizens’ Observatories INSPIRE Hackathon” is the first ever hackathon taking place at an INSPIRE conference. It sustains and develops the unique European Citizens’ Observatories concept as a forceful tool in environmental management and public participation.
| Volunteered Geographical Information | Citizens’ Observatories |
| Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals. (source: Goodchild, 2007) | An observatory where citizens ideas and contributions are welcomed. It is an all open access infrastructure serving as a pathway for citizens’ contributions to solving local, regional and global challenges. (source: …)
Citizens’ observatories are where work is undertaken by civic educators together with citizen communities to advance science, foster a broad scientific mentality, and/or encourage democratic engagement, which allows society to deal rationally with complex modern problems. (Source: Ceccaroni et al., 2016) |
The goal
The Hackathon has built the link among data from area of Citizens observatories and projects focused on Open GI Data (Foodie, SDI4Apps, Open Transport Net). The hackathon should transfer results from this projects to the new suite of citizens observatories (GROW, SCENT, Ground Truth 2.0, LandSense) so that they can benefit from the work done and further develop the results.
In addition to make use of existing tools, it is also a goal to combine data from various sources, including those provided by the current Citizens Observatories, Copernicus, GEOSS, and INSPIRE, as well as data collected and produced in the MyGEOSS apps and the EU projects Foodie, SDI4Apps, Open Transport Net, etc.
The objective
The objective of the first INSPIRE hackathon is to end up with i) concrete proposals of re-using the outcomes of previous research projects and already available data sets to the benefit of new Citizen Observatories; ii) a set of additions to the Citizens’ Observatories toolkit; and iii) a prototype data model that can be used across the current and future Citizens’ Observatories and other citizen science initiatives.
The challenges
1 How might future environmental management and public participation be improved by re-using already available data and tools?
2 How can the 4 new Citizens’ observatories as well as next generations of observatories re-use and tailor the tools developed in the 5 first Citizens’ Observatories (in particular the soon ending CITI-SENSE, WeSenseIt and CobWeb projects), and related projects like SDI4Apps, FOODIE and Open Transport Net?
3 Based on use cases from the 4 new Citizens’ Observatories, how can data from a variety of data sources be made interoperable and integrated as information answering concrete environmental issues? Evolution of a common Citizen Science data model and support for interoperability
4) Concepts of “Maps” as Volunteered Geographic Information. It include Mobile sharing of Maps, but also concept “Google Docs for Maps”: collaborative whiteboard for drawing on maps.
