Citizen Science experience from past research projects

Joint ILIAD webinar series with:

• Bente Lilja Bye, BLB
• Stephen Parkinson, Earthwatch
• Dori Edelist, University of Haifa
• Claire Laudy, Thales
• Joan Maso, CREAF

Replay the webinar

Technical integration of app data in data platforms – The use of InSyTo toolbox for the Odyssea EU project

Claire Laudy, Thales

Graph based representations appear to be naturally well adapted to represent information reported by humans. The specificity of this information is that it conveys a high level of semantics embedded in the information itself (i.e. the information is reported in its context). With the aim of supporting semantic information fusion, the InSyTo toolbox provides basic functions for semantic information manipulation.

The toolbox relies on the use of the conceptual graphs model that is made, on the one hand of an ontology that describes the domain model, and on the other hand semantic graphs expressed following this ontology, to express the information items. The algorithms themselves are generic algorithms that may be customized with fusion strategies.

Fusion strategies are similarity measures, compatibility thresholds and fusion functions that encode some of the expert domain knowledge.

According to the different algorithms and the fusion strategies that are used, InSyTo algorithms provide several operations that can be combined in order to develop applications for specific domains and needs. The basic functions are the following:

• Information Synthesis
• Information Fusion
• Information Query
• Similarity process
• Frequent pattern mining

Within the H2020 EU Odyssea Project, we developed an application above the InSyTo toolbox, in order to aggregate information provided by citizens about events of interest. These events range from jellyfish blooms to illegal fishing activities or pollution events. The idea was to integrate as much information as possible, from as many information sources as possible, to provide an overview of the state of the Mediterranean sea regarding these events so that end-users could make decisions about them.