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Zooniverse: observing the world's largest citizen science platform

Published: 07 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces the Zooniverse citizen science project and software framework, outlining its structure from an observatory perspective: both as an observable web-based system in itself, and as an example of a platform iteratively developed according to real-world deployment and used at scale. We include details of the technical architecture of Zooniverse, including the mechanisms for data gathering across the Zooniverse operation, access, and analysis. We consider the lessons that can be drawn from the experience of designing and running Zooniverse, and how this might inform development of other web observatories.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '14 Companion: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web
April 2014
1396 pages
ISBN:9781450327459
DOI:10.1145/2567948
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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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 April 2014

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Author Tags

  1. citizen science
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. web observatories

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  • Research-article

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WWW '14
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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2024)Crowdsourcing Geospatial Data for Earth and Human Observations: A ReviewJournal of Remote Sensing10.34133/remotesensing.01054Online publication date: 22-Jan-2024
  • (2024)New Horizons in Web Search, Web Data Mining, and Web-Based ApplicationsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1402053014:2(530)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Transformation of Models of Interaction between Science and Society: From the Dialogical Model of Popularization to the Network Structure of Citizen ScienceScience Management: Theory and Practice10.19181/smtp.2024.6.3.146:3(193-207)Online publication date: 2024
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