A Practical Approach to an Integrated Citizens' Observatory: The CITI-SENSE Framework.

The prevalence of research projects that include a focus on Citizens’
Observatories (CO) is on the rise, and this increase has led to many initiatives,
most notably ‘Eye on Earth’ which aims to provide a platform which will
“facilitate the sharing of environmental, societal and economic data and
information, provided by the diversity of knowledge communities, to support
sustainable development.” This statement covers a whole range of CO
communities and projects that can be said to share a common goal, but in many
other ways are quite diverse and, from an architectural and Shared
Environmental Information System (SEIS) perspective, may focus on different
aspects. This paper will seek to provide a practical approach to creating an
integrated Citizens' Observatory based on the work undertaken in the EU FP7
CITI-SENSE project and following the CITI-SENSE Framework (CSF).