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Using social media for collaborative species identification and occurrence: issues, methods, and tools

Published: 06 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The emergence of social media enables people to interact with others on the web in ways that are media-rich ("updates" or "posts" can be text, photo, audio, video, etc), time-shifted (correspondence need not happen at once or within a pre-defined time frame), and social in nature. By utilizing social media, citizen science projects can potentially engage many participants to contribute their observations covering a large geographic region and over a long time period. This is an improvement, for example, over traditional biodiversity surveys which typically involve relatively few people in confined regions and periods.
As social media is not designed for scientific data collection and analysis, there is a problem in transferring unstructured information items (e.g. free-form text, unidentified images, etc.) often found in social media to structured data records for scientific tasks. To help bridge this gap, we propose an approach comprised of three steps: (1) Information Extraction, (2) Information Formalization, and (3) Information Reuse. We apply this approach to processing posts and comments from two Facebook interest groups on species observations. Our study demonstrates that with principled methods and proper tools, crowdsourced social media contents such as those from Facebook interest groups can be used for collaborative species identification and occurrence.

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  • (2021)The Partnership of Citizen Science and Machine Learning: Benefits, Risks, and Future Challenges for Engagement, Data Collection, and Data QualitySustainability10.3390/su1314808713:14(8087)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2021
  • (2021)Research on 3D urban landscape design and evaluation based on geographic information systemEnvironmental Earth Sciences10.1007/s12665-021-09886-y80:17Online publication date: 23-Aug-2021
  • (2015)Uncertainty analysis of crowd-sourced and professionally collected field data used in species distribution models of Taiwanese mothsBiological Conservation10.1016/j.biocon.2014.11.012181(102-110)Online publication date: Jan-2015
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cover image ACM Conferences
GEOCROWD '12: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information
November 2012
98 pages
ISBN:9781450316941
DOI:10.1145/2442952
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 November 2012

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  1. Facebook
  2. citizen science
  3. linking open data
  4. social media
  5. volunteered geographic information

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 30 submissions, 57%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)The Partnership of Citizen Science and Machine Learning: Benefits, Risks, and Future Challenges for Engagement, Data Collection, and Data QualitySustainability10.3390/su1314808713:14(8087)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2021
  • (2021)Research on 3D urban landscape design and evaluation based on geographic information systemEnvironmental Earth Sciences10.1007/s12665-021-09886-y80:17Online publication date: 23-Aug-2021
  • (2015)Uncertainty analysis of crowd-sourced and professionally collected field data used in species distribution models of Taiwanese mothsBiological Conservation10.1016/j.biocon.2014.11.012181(102-110)Online publication date: Jan-2015
  • (2014)Monitoring Breeding Bird Populations in TaiwanIntegrative Observations and Assessments10.1007/978-4-431-54783-9_3(51-63)Online publication date: 6-May-2014

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