Toolkit
Glossary
Term | Definition |
Bottom-up | Refers to a situation where community members generate the research question or initiate a project. Opposite of >Top-down |
Campaign | Short term activity or project |
Collective Intelligence | Shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision-making |
Data cleaning | The process of removing inconsistencies from data (or dealing with outliers) before analysis |
Data management plan | Document that describes the data lifecycle: how it is collected, processed, published, etc. |
Data quality | Activities that apply quality management techniques to data, such as planning, implementation, or control, in order to assure the data is fit for consumption and meet the needs of data consumers |
Data set | Collection of information belonging together (often a spreadsheet with values) |
EDI | Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. This refers to the social dimension of citizen science projects |
Experiment | Procedure carried out to test a hypothesis |
FAIR principles | Principles that apply to open science data. The four principles are: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability |
GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679. EU law governing data protection principles, including the collection, storage and usage of personal data |
Hypothesis | Verifiable or falsifiable statement of an expected research outcome |
Impact | Consequences of an action. For CS projects, impact primarily concerns intended consequences or goals |
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) | Rights of content producers. IPR are created with the development of any outputs (analysis, reports, videos, photos…). The most common form is Copyright. IPR can be sold, released, or adapted through > Licensing. |
Licensing | Licenses regulate the ownership and legal use of resources, such as data. The most common form of licensing is Creative Commons. Licenses allow others to use the licensed resource under the terms the license defines (such as ‘name the source’) |
Milestone | Key points in a project plan, that need to be achieved. |
Motivation | Personal motivation is a key aspect in volunteers’ participation in citizen science |
Open Data | Data/information that is reusable by others through appropriate > Licencing |
Platform | Software infrastructure that allows or eases specific steps of a citizen science project, such as data gathering (e.g. on EpicollectV,) or classification (e.g. on Zooniverse) |
Policy maker | Any actor involved in making or influencing policy, at any level of government or another organisation |
Research question | A question that a study or research project aims to answer. It often addresses an issue or a problem, which, through analysis and interpretation of data, is answered in the study’s conclusion |
Results aggregation | The process of grouping together results produced by multiple contributors. |
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) | Approach to research and innovation that accounts for its > Impact |
Sample | A specimen or small amount of something, often for analysis |
Sensor | Device that measures something, often automatically |
Stakeholder | All people/groups with an influence on or an interest in a project |
Top-down | Refers to a situation where a person or institution outside the community, usually with authority within the research or governance space, initiates a project |
Volunteers | Citizen science contributors participating in > Campaigns as volunteers |