Open Data Kit Goes Semantic - A Contribution to the Interpretability and Interoperability of Field Data

Abstract

In citizen science and field research, data collection via mobile applications is playing an increasingly important role. A wide range of software frameworks have emerged, which allow to easily create and distribute form-based surveys for collecting data via mobile applications. Although these frameworks support scientists in designing and conducting data collection surveys, data export is usually limited to tabular standard formats such as CSV or Excel. The attached metadata is rather scarce, so the semantics of the data (what was measured/observed?) often remains unclear. This limits the reuse of the collected databeyond their initial usage context, as interpretability and integration with other data is hampered. In our talk, we introduce a methodology we developed and a software tool that allows researchers to easily enrich their forms for campaigns with semantic annotations and flexibly export the collected data into user-defined formats. In addition to classical description languages such as XML, export to the W3C standard RDF (Linked Open Data) is supported. This enables to link data with their machine-readable meaning. The software implementation of the method was realized as an extension of the widely used data collection framework Open Data Kit 1 (ODK1) and is freely available as open source.