Software solutions for form-based, mobile data collection - A comparative evaluation

Abstract

Many citizen science projects rely on their contributors going to the field and collecting data. Due to their wide availability and increasing capability, modern mobile devices have become an indispensable tool to ease the collection process. Projects can publish mobile apps, that allow contributors to easily collect data and submit their results. The requirements of individual projects oftentimes overlap to a large extent, which triggered the development of multiple generic frameworks. They allow new projects to quickly generate customized apps and reuse existing infrastructure. However, the wide landscape of tools with diverging capabilities requires projects to compare and choose. This report supports data managers in making an informed decision. We report on our experiences primarily on the whole data collection workflow starting from setting up your own instance to finally analyzing the retrieved data. We compare eight tools – both free and commercial - according to the features provided and difficulties encountered.