COBWEB is a European Union FP7 funded citizen science project that has produced a platform through which citizens living within Biosphere Reserves will be able to collect environmental data using mobile devices. Part of the infrastructure are a COBWEB mobile app, the survey designer and the Personal Cloud API (PCAPI) middleware. The survey designer is a GUI editor for generating custom forms, which can be downloaded onto the app, together with a map interface for viewing data captured in the field and a mechanism for exporting user data to CSV, KML and GeoJSON. The COBWEB app has been generated on the foundations of Fieldtrip Open, which is a modular plug-in framework to enable developers to write their own extensions and re-use plugins written by others. This framework has been used in the creation of other production strength apps e.g. the FieldtripGB, FieldtripOSM. The framework is based on Cordova framework and can be compiled to Android and iOS and potentially all other platforms targeted by Cordova. Plugins have already been written for capturing GPS tracks, geocoding, caching off-line maps, creating Geo-Fences, overlaying layers in MBTiles and KML Format, extending the records with sensor data, making decision tree questionnaires and syncing data on the cloud. The synching functionality is the one that allows user to download their custom forms to their devices and layers and upload their captured data to their personal cloud space. Finally, PCAPI is a middle-ware which abstracts storage to cloud providers e.g. Dropbox or a local File system. All the software is (modified) BSD-licensed. |