Data Curation for Community Science Project: CHIME Pilot Study

Abstract

This paper introduces a community science project, Citizen Data Harvest in Motion Everywhere (CHIME), and the findings from our pilot study, which investigated potential concerns regarding data curation. The CHIME project aims to build a cyclist community–driven data archive that citizens, community scientists, and governments can use and reuse. While citizens’ involvement in the project enables data collection on a massive, unprecedented scale, the citizen-generated data (cyclists’ video data recorded with wearable cameras in the CHIME context) also presents several concerns regarding curation due to the grassroots nature of the data. Learning from our examination of cyclists’ video data and interviews with them, we will discuss the curation concerns and challenges we identified in our pilot study and introduce our approach to addressing these issues. Our study will provide insights into data curation concerns, to which other citizen science projects can refer. As a next step, we are in the process of developing a data curation model that will consider other factors related to this community science project and can be implemented in future community science projects.