Summary

Reptile Road Mortality (in Chinese, 路殺社) is a citizen science project which aims to collect reports of dead animals that have been struck and/or killed by motor vehicles through the use of Facebook. The use of Facebook makes citizen easy to provide their observations. However, the crowdsourced information contributed by citizens through social media is often in unstructured data format such as text and image. It is a challenge to process unstructured data collections for scientific purposes. In order to engage social media with citizen science, we developed novel methods to transfer unstructured data to structured data for scientific purposes.

Keywords. Citizen science, Facebook, crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information, semantic web.

see more, SciDataCon 2014