Powered by advances of technology, today’s Citizen Science projects cover a wide range of thematic areas and are carried out from local to global levels. This wealth of activities creates an abundance of data, for example, in the forms of observations submitted by mobile phones; readings of low-cost sensors; or more general information about peoples’ activities. The management and possible sharing of this data has become a research topic in its own right. We conducted a survey in the summer of 2015 in order to collectively analyze the state of play in Citizen Science. This paper summarizes our main findings related to data access, standardization and data preservation. We provide examples of good practices in each of these areas and outline actions to address identified challenges.

In this paper, we outline the functionalities of a system that integrates and controls a fleet of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs have a set of payload sensors employed for territorial surveillance, whose outputs are stored in the system and analysed by the data exploitation functions at different levels. In particular, we detail the second level data exploitation function whose aim is to improve the sensors data interpretation in the post-mission activities. It is concerned with the mosaicking of the aerial images and the cartography enrichment by human sensors—the social media users. We also describe the software architecture for the development of a mash-up (the integration of information and functionalities coming from the Web) and the possibility of using human sensors in the monitoring of the territory, a field in which, traditionally, the involved sensors were only the hardware ones.

Next is a presentation of the complete system architecture, followed by a discussion of the details of the various services. Amongst these services, management and simulation of tactical planning, management of data and streaming video, the system also presents a service for the annotation of the interested spatial objects. Annotation deploys the web services (Alonso, Casati, Kuno, & Machiraju, 2004) exported by OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap) with the purpose to exploit the on-line information sources continuously updated by the social networks communities.

Abstract. MetaData Retrieval (MDR) is a software module for the enrichment of geo-referenced maps with metadata. Metadata are annotations on spatial locations that are taken from the Volunteered Graphical Information projects like OpenStreetMap and GeoNames.The MDR user acts with a user-friendly GUI, a Query By Example in which the user specifies in a multi-dimensional data model the spatial objects for which new information are searched for. The request is translated into SQL queries for the database and in web service requests for OpenStreetMap and GeoNames. Downloaded annotations are checked and compared with the history for duplicate elimination. Annotations are presented to the user in the context of an interactive, geo-referenced map and in a hierarchical, ontological structure, that is a facility for indexing and browsing. On demand, an annotation is stored in the system history. Finally, the user can filter the annotations that characterize a specified area by a statistical filter that compares the annotation frequency with the neighborhood.

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