The European Union promotes Cos4Cloud (Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud), an ambitious project that will create cutting-edge technology services to improve citizen science platforms. Among other services it will include: integrating observations from different citizen science platforms into a portal, artificial intelligence tools that help citizens recognize species when they send an observation and standardize data from different platforms.
The project, co-funded by the European Horizon 2020 program, will make these services available to the entire community in the new European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a virtual space aimed at European scientific staff. “It will be like going to a supermarket to take the ingredients that interest us to improve or create our own citizen observatory”, says Jaume Piera, Institute of Marine Science of CSIC (ICM-CSIC) researcher, associate researcher at CREAF and project coordinator.
“It will be like going to a supermarket to take the ingredients that interest us to improve or create our own citizen observatory” Jaume Piera, Institute of Marine Science of CSIC (ICM-CSIC) researcher, associate researcher at CREAF and project coordinator.
9 citizen observatories and Do It Yourself (DIY) initiatives focus on biodiversity and environmental monitoring are involved in the project and will be responsible for testing the services with their users.
Cos4Cloud started with the team’s kick-off meeting in November 2019 and will finish in 2023.