CitizenGrid: An Online Middleware for Crowdsourcing Scientific Research

TL;DR

CitizenGrid is an online platform that simplifies the deployment and management of citizen science projects by leveraging cloud and virtualization technologies, encouraging more scientists to involve the public in research.

Contribution

It introduces a middleware platform that reduces complexity and enhances accessibility for deploying citizen science projects using cloud and virtualization.

Findings

Provides a web-based directory of citizen science projects

Enables monitoring and control of multiple projects from a single interface

Supports diverse types of citizen science initiatives

Abstract

In the last few years, contributions of the general public in scientific projects has increased due to the advancement of communication and computing technologies. Internet played an important role in connecting scientists and volunteers who are interested in participating in their scientific projects. However, despite potential benefits, only a limited number of crowdsourcing based large-scale science (citizen science) projects have been deployed due to the complexity involved in setting them up and running them. In this paper, we present CitizenGrid - an online middleware platform which addresses security and deployment complexity issues by making use of cloud computing and virtualisation technologies. CitizenGrid incentivises scientists to make their small-to-medium scale applications available as citizen science projects by: 1) providing a directory of projects through a web-based portal that makes applications easy to discover; 2) providing flexibility to participate in, monitor, and control multiple citizen science projects from a common interface; 3) supporting diverse categories of citizen science projects. The paper describes the design, development and evaluation of CitizenGrid and its use cases.