Community Science – The Next Frontier Deborah L. McGuinness 12 ( dlm@cs.rpi )

1. IN51C-1695 Community Science – The Next Frontier Deborah L. McGuinness12 (dlm@cs.rpi.edu) (1Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th St., Troy, NY, 12180 United States) (2McGuinness Associates, Latham, NY, United States) Abstract As data proliferates and becomes increasingly available, and as topic areas become broader and more diverse, it becomes increasingly important to find, access, and integrate data in the many emerging science collaboratories. The web, with its ever increasing data sources can be viewed as essentially a constantly available collection of massive amounts of data that is increasingly linked together. The ideas behind linked data are simple – expose, share, and connect data. As this paradigm continues to explode, and as governments are expanding their encouragement and sometimes demands to share data on the web, we are seeing a significant increase in not just data available on the web, but also we are seeing the data begin to be published with links to other data. Simultaneously with the linked data explosion we are seeing a growing number of communities forming around science issues. The communities may be highly trained scientists or enthusiasts (sometimes with little training) or may be any combination of skill and interest level. We call these efforts community science as they are forming communities to engage in science. We distinguish them from citizen science in that it is often not the case that they are only populated by citizens who are untrained in science – communities cover a wide range of skill and training. In this talk, we will discuss how linked data can be and is being used in community science efforts. We also will endeavor to describe how linked data can enable a next generation of community science. Acknowledgments: Sponsors: Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Glossary: CMS – Content Management System DOI – Digital Object Identifier OWL– Web Ontology Language RDFs – Resource Description Framework Schema RDFa – Resource Description Framework Attributes RPI/TWC – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / Tetherless World Constellation