FieldMarking

As the word is starting to spread about what we are doing here, it seems timely to cover some basics. Here’s the idea in a nutshell.

• Fact: People are already inclined to share what they’ve seen outdoors in their favorite online communities, photo-sharing sites, and on their blogs. In fact, they enjoy telling nicely illustrated stories.
• Fact: Even if those posts are carefully tagged it is hard to quickly query ALL of them for information useful to science. Yet often there is a lot of good information there.
• Assertion: Formal citizen science projects are fine for well-defined data collection, especially when there is an opportunity for training. They aren’t so good if you see something outside the protocol.
• Strong suspicion: Some problems, like new or spreading invasives, or emerging diseases, may not wait for good protocols. Or at least the people who first notice them may not be aware of specific protocols.
• Hope: With the right technology, and some social incentives, adding a little semantic markup to free form blog posts will make it easier to find, collate, and display casual observation data.
• Hope: Excitement will grow as we display posts on maps, or visualize in other ways what’s being blogged about .
• Hope: Semantic ecobloggers will help each other out, will code data from non-semantic ecobloggers, and everyone will become more aware of the standards of evidence necessary for a good observation.

So, what kind of observations are we looking for?

1. Something out of the ordinary: an organism you can’t identify, one that seems out of range, or a behavior that you’ve never noticed before. Might be new to science. Or it might be new to you, and that’s okay.
2. Something that has to do with seasonal timing. Not only do people in general like to know exactly when the robins have returned for spring, that is the sort of information that helps scientists gauge the impact of climate change or other human impacts.
3. Something that got you thinking. Aside from the scientific value in these observations, there’s a big plus in engaging with the natural world. That’s another essay in itself.

History: Over the years I’ve written technical briefs and pre-proposals trying to inspire NSF’s interest. This post was written more than two years ago! Here’s the latest pitch to scale it to my local community. The good news is that Andriy Parafiynyk on the Spire team has been prototyping a Firefox plug-in that will streamline the coding process. Allan Hollander has already started trying it, and I believed he coined the phrase “semantic ecoblogging” which is a bit more descriptive than FieldMarking. I should note that the “hopes” above are really “hope-otheses” that we can publish on. Also we’re hoping to compare the pluses and minuses of a number of technologies.