Citizen Science Association Data & Metadata Working Group: Report from CSA 2017 and Future Outlook

Authors:Anne Bowser, Peter Brenton, Rob Stevenson, Greg Newman, Sven Schade, Lucy Bastin, Alison Parker, Jessie Oliver*

With the growth of citizen science comes the challenge of coordinating people, projects, and data. This challenge also presents an opportunity. Through the use of data and metadata standards and other mechanisms to promote interoperability, data can support multiple research questions, allowing citizen science to help address ever grander issues and problems on local, regional, national, and global scales. 

In 2015, the U.S.-based Citizen Science Association (CSA) founded a Data and Metadata Working Group. The purpose of the CSA Data and Metadata Working group is to support, advance, and facilitate data interoperability among and between citizen science projects and other data repositories; and, to promote collaboration in citizen science via the development and/or improvement of international standards for data and metadata. The goals of the CSA Data and Metadata Working Group are to coordinate global efforts towards data and metadata interoperability and to ensure that all relevant stakeholders are included in these discussions.  

The first formal meeting of the working group was held at the second international conference of the Citizen Science Association in May 2017. During this meeting, working group members discussed the history, purpose, and goals of the working group. A governance structure was finalized to include a large leadership team and a number of task forces. This document reports on the outcomes of this meeting, includes a list of working group members and partner organizations, and advances an agenda for the CSA Data and Metadata Working group to pursue in the coming years.