The COBWEB Summit was held as a side event chaired by Chris Higgins at the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) 99th Technical and Planning Committee (TC/PC) Meeting. The event was held at University College Dublin.

1. COBWEB Summit
OGC TC Dublin,
21st June, 2016
Chris Higgins
chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk
Sta

2. Agenda
Time Who Slot Notes
Tues 21st June, 2016
1245-1300 Arrival
1300-1330 Chris Welcome, context
1330-1400 MichaelK/
AndreasM
German demonstrator
1400-1445 Barnard/UCD Semantics the UCD way
1445-1515 Coffee
1515-1600 Ingo/Rob Modelling progress
1600-1630 AndreasM Privacy and security
1630-1700 Mike/UNOTT Quality Assurance

3. Objectives
• Inform participants of the work
undertaken under COBWEB
• Stimulate discussion around the more
problematic and challenging areas
• Identify requirements for future work
in respect of interoperability and
standardisation
• Help me distill some takeaway lessons
from COBWEB for the TC

4. Introduction to COBWEB
• Research Project: Funded (EUR6.5M)
under the European Commission’s
Framework Programme 7
• SME Targeted Collaborative project
• Required to work within GEOSS
framework
• Started Nov 2012, ends Oct 31st 2016
(4 years)

5. Big Picture #1
• Explosion in availability of smartphones and tablets equals
great potential for “citizens as sensors”
• How to make the data gathered usable and reusable?
• What quality measures are needed?
• How to reduce uncertainty?
• How can crowdsourced environmental data aid decision
making?
• How can our crowdsourced data be conflated with
reference data and be deployed in standards based
Spatial Data Infrastructures?

6. Big Picture #2
• COBWEB set out to research and develop a “generic
crowdsourcing infrastructure platform”
• toolkit which can be downloaded and used in
multiple scenarios
• Use and reuse potential of these data (cit sci) is
significant but currently compromised by a lack of
interoperability
• Large volumes of data are being created but exist in
silos
• Useable standards either don’t exist, are neglected,
poorly understood or tooling is unavailable

7. Project Partners

8. UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves
Sites of excellence to foster
harmonious integration of people and
nature for sustainable development
through participation, knowledge
sharing, poverty reduction and human
well-being improvements, cultural
values and society's ability to cope
with change, thus contributing to the
Millennium Development Goals

9. COBWEB Biosphere Reserves
Biosffer Dyfi Biosphere
Mount Olympus
Gorge of Samaria
Wadden See & Hallig islands

10. COBWEB is not a collection of Apps…
A number of demonstrator mobile phone
applications
– Exactly what, deliberately left open and
subject to discussion with community
3 pilot case study areas:
1. Validating earth
observation products
2. Biological monitoring
3. Flooding

11. Co-design

12. COBWEB Framework

13. Technology Readiness Levels (TRL)
TRL Definition
1 basic principles observed
2 technology concept formulated
3 experimental proof of concept
4 technology validated in lab
5 technology validated in relevant environment (industrially
relevant environment in the case of key enabling technologies)
6 technology demonstrated in relevant environment (industrially
relevant environment in the case of key enabling technologies)
7 system prototype demonstration in operational environment
8 system complete and qualified
9 actual system proven in operational environment (competitive
manufacturing in the case of key enabling technologies; or in
space)

14. Project characteristics
Mainly
medium to
high TRLs
High TRLs
By definition,
lower TRLs
1. Commission wants production strength outputs
that contribute to GEOSS development
2. An “SME Targeted Collaborative” project
• 30% EU contribution to SMEs
3. Develop 'citizens' observatories’
• Mobilise citizens
• Emphasised during Grant Negotiation
• “Co-design” fund established
4. A research project doing innovative work
• Crowdsourced environmental data to aid decision
making
High TRLs

15. Key components at different TRL’s
• QA workflow editor
• QA WPS/services
• Conflation
• Sensor networks
• GeoNetwork/Portal
• Middleware
• Authoring tool/Survey designer
• Apps
• User management and privacy
• Access control
• Authentication

16. View COBWEB Portal

17. COBWEB Framework

18. The COBWEB version of GeoNetwork
• Open source implementation of the OGC
Catalogue Services for the Web
• Input and storage schemas:
– ISO19139, ISO199115-1
• Alternative output schemas available:
– Dublin core
– SensorML
– DCAT
– PPSR_CORE
• Supports registration of ‘surveys’ or ‘citizen
science projects’

19. FieldtripOpen

20. FieldtripOpen - Customise your own app for your survey

21. FieldtripOpen - Customise your own app for your survey

22. FieldtripOpen - Customise your own app for your survey

23. Citizen captures data on their phone

24. COBWEB Framework

25. Classifying quality: Seven pillars
Pillar Example Test Notes
Pillar 1 – Location Based
services
Assessment of spatial
accuracy – estimate from a
mobile device and number
of satellites
Tests often carried out on
the mobile device
Pillar 2 – Cleaning Removal of junk data via
an attribute text check
Very lightweight, can flag
or remove malicious entries
Pillar 3 – Automatic
validation
Analysis whether an image
is blurry
Higher level testing, often
used to assess ranges
Pillar 4 – Comparison with
authoritative data
Use of a set of boundary
polygons to check whether
an observation is in or out
Wide variety of tests that
involve comparison with
what it known
Pillar 5 – Model based
validation
Running a flood model Can be complex, and may
also include question based
modeling
Pillar 6 – Big/Linked data Querying Twitter via a
hashtag for similar
phenomena
Tapping into large
databases such as sensor
records and social media
Pillar 7 – Semantic
harmonisation
Rationalisation of entries
via an ontology
Attempts to recognise
multiple entries of the
same observation

26. Quality process web editor

27. COBWEB Framework

28. Conflation
• Combination of spatial data from multiple
sources to produce a combined view that
contains the most valuable data from the inputs
• Used in Quality Assurance
• Used for data enrichment, eg, from sensors
• OGC Web Processing Service interface used

29. SWE4CS
Publishing
Data

30. SWE4CS – introduces semantics

31. SWE4CS – Why bother?
• If a significant amount of Cit Sci data can
be published to this standard
• It becomes more useful; its immediately
understood by people who understand
the standard
• The same tooling can be used and reused
• Integration costs decrease

32. Sustainability #1
• Intending to open source as many of
the COBWEB components as possible
• FieldtripOpen into OSGeo one option
and looking at the incubation process
• SME’s leading this aspect of COBWEB

33. Sustainability #2
• Creation of a Citizen Science DWG would be /
will be a significant output
– as long as has community support
• Reliant upon new projects picking up on
outputs, eg, followon citizen observatory’s
• Would like to, eg, via a hackathon, make
benefits demonstrable and broadcast, but
– SWE4CS currently a moving target
– can we conclude with something like a v1 in association
with the Best Practice paper in Sept 2016?