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Framework for Processing Citizens Science Data for Applications to NASA Earth Science MissionsCitizen science (or crowdsourcing) has drawn much high-level recent and ongoing interest and support. It is poised to be applied, beyond the by-now fairly familiar use of, e.g., Twitter for natural hazards monitoring, to science research, such as augmenting the validation of NASA earth science mission data. This interest and support is seen in the 2014 National Plan for Civil Earth Observations, the 2015 White House forum on citizen science and crowdsourcing, the ongoing Senate Bill 2013 (Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015), the recent (August 2016) Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) call for public participation in its newly-established Citizen Science Domain Working Group, and NASA's initiation of a new Citizen Science for Earth Systems Program (along with its first citizen science-focused solicitation for proposals). Over the past several years, we have been exploring the feasibility of extracting from the Twitter data stream useful information for application to NASA precipitation research, with both "passive" and "active" participation by the twitterers. The Twitter database, which recently passed its tenth anniversary, is potentially a rich source of real-time and historical global information for science applications. The time-varying set of "precipitation" tweets can be thought of as an organic network of rain gauges, potentially providing a widespread view of precipitation occurrence. The validation of satellite precipitation estimates is challenging, because many regions lack data or access to data, especially outside of the U.S. and in remote and developing areas. Mining the Twitter stream could augment these validation programs and, potentially, help tune existing algorithms. Our ongoing work, though exploratory, has resulted in key components for processing and managing tweets, including the capabilities to filter the Twitter stream in real time, to extract location information, to filter for exact phrases, and to plot tweet distributions. The key step is to process the "precipitation" tweets to be compatible with satellite-retrieved precipitation data. These key components for processing and managing "precipitation" tweets (and additional ones to be developed) are not limited to precipitation, nor are they limited to the Twitter social medium. Indeed, to maximize the value of our work for NASA earth science programs, these components should be generalized and be part of an overall framework for processing citizen science data for science research. In this paper, we outline such a framework.
Document ID
20170002319
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Teng, William
(Adnet Systems, Inc. Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Albayrak, Arif
(Adnet Systems, Inc. Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Date Acquired
March 17, 2017
Publication Date
March 14, 2017
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Social And Information Sciences (General)
Report/Patent Number
GSFC-E-DAA-TN40068
Meeting Information
Meeting: ASPRS IGTF 2017 Annual Conference
Location: Baltimore, MD
Country: United States
Start Date: March 14, 2017
End Date: March 16, 2017
Sponsors: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNG12PL17C
OTHER: 012345
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
Keywords
earth science satellite data
Twitter
citizen science
metadata
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