Community-as-a-Service: Data Validation in Citizen Science

Abstract

Currently, most citizen science projects that adopt a crowdsourcing model focus primarily on collecting and analyzing data. As yet, few of them leverage community interactions for effective data validation yet, which would have significant impact on improving the quality of the increasing volume of citizen science data. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory pilot study focused on understanding how an established online community can be leveraged to create a “community as a service” structure to support collaborative citizen science data validation.