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Crowd Sourcing and Community Management Capabilities Available within Symbiota Data PortalsNico Franz1, Corinna Gries2 , Thomas Nash III2 & Edward Gilbert1

1 School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University 2 Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin

TDWD 2013 Annual Conference, Florence, Italy Building and Maintaining Crowd Sourcing Websites and Their CommunitiesOctober 29, 2013

Presentation Overview @ http://taxonbytes.org/tdwg-2013-crowd-sourcing-and-community-management-capabilities-with-symbiota/

Lichen, Bryophytes and Climate Change scope and goals

Support NSF ADBC Program Award EF 1115116Covering ~ 2.3 million specimens: 900,000 lichens & 1.4 million bryophytes90% of all specimens housed in this region; > 60 non-governmental herbariaLBCC has 16 focused digitization centers where voucher labels are imaged

= LBCC imaging centersLBCC sustaining Symbiota-based data portalsConsortium of North American Lichen HerbariaURL: http://lichenportal.org/portal/ Currently with 51 member collectionsTotal of 1,084,888 records (October, 2013)

Consortium of North American Bryophyte HerbariaURL: http://bryophyteportal/ Currently with 46 member collectionsTotal of 1,437,735 records (October, 2013)

Each portal is sustained by Symbiota

CNALHCNABH

Lichen portal 7,302 visitors / 3 months Bryophyte portal 1,530 visitors / 3 months LBCC member portals are active virtual environments

Overview of the LBCC digitization workflow (label imaging) The LBCC digitization workflow (completion of records) depends critically on the sustained participation of editors/transcribers, and of volunteers.Imaging StageCapture Imagebarcode in file nameCreate Skeleton Filespecies name, country, state, exsiccati, etc.Upload to FTP serverImage processing extract barcode, create web versions, map to portal DBs Herbarium DatabaseAutomated OCRTesseract, ABBYYExisting Record simply link imageUpload to FTP serverImage URLsManage Specimen Data in PortalManage / Review Records in PortalSymbiotaEditor review, edit, keystrokeCreate New Record barcode, image, skeletal dataAutomated NLPDarwin Core ParsingCrowdsourcingCentralDetailed workflow diagram LBCC Crowdsourcing elements Workflow "closes" in home collectionHow does LBCC engage volunteers?

LBCC Drupal website is primarily a means to socially and intellectually engage and recruit prospective volunteers.http://lbcc1.acis.ufl.edu/

Login to each member portal is simple,requiring no special rights.

"Annotate the Harriman Alaska Expedition"

"Transcribe the ALCAN Expedition" "Create your own" ** Instant feedback on data volume.

Listing of pending "Harriman" records; each Symbiota ID is clickable to edit.

The LBCC digitization workflow pipeline has produced a "skeletal record", including:

Record GUIDThesaurus-ratified Scientific Name (not editable)OCR of voucher locality label image

"Parse OCR (LBCC)" [a custom LBCC program] will get the transcription process underway.LBCCCrowdSourcingCentral

Record1545184

1. Initial "Parse OCR" outcome (issues with lat/long transcription)

2. Correction of the parse using Symbiota tools (e.g. GeoLocate)

3. Approaching a clean record1 transcription, ready for saving1 DwC Class: CleanRecord Utter these two words in front of a TDWG audience, then immediately prepare to [remainder not yet ratified].Crowd Sourcing Central Score Board *

Options to review one's submitted records and review points assigned (by the collection's manager).* See also Appendix I.

Crowd Sourcing Central User's Review Pages *

My pending records with LBCC.My 2/4 approved records/points.* See also Appendix III.Crowd Sourcing Central Collection Manager's Control Panel

* See also Appendix II. 4215 newly digitized records are available for addition to the queue. 25 submissions pending.Crowd Sourcing Central Collection Manager's Review Pages

* See also Appendix III. 2 points = default score. Specific feedback possible.A key purpose of the LBCC portal CS entry environment is to create a user experience that is personalized.

Special expeditions are a subset of the records queue for CS data entry, and are identified as being part of a "special group/theme" of specimens.

Expeditions are meant to educate those who are performing the data entry about a specific event.

They also aid data entry because the user generally deals with a homogeneous type of label format, as opposed to shifting between numerous layout types.

User input and managerial control (review, feedback, scoring) are interactively facilitated in the same Crowd Sourcing module implemented in Symbiota.Lichen, Bryophytes and Climate Change CS in reviewTDWG 2013 Symposium organizers Paul Kenneth Flemons

Ben Brandt & John Brinda LBCC software development

Participating CNALH & CNABH collections

NSF Award EF-1115116. "Digitization TCN Collaborative Research: North American Lichens and Bryophytes: Sensitive Indicators of Environmental Quality and Change."Acknowledgments

http://taxonbytes.org https://sols.asu.edu http://symbiota.org/tiki/tiki-index.php

http://lbcc1.acis.ufl.edu/http://lichenportal.org/portal/http://bryophyteportal/ Appendix I: Crowd Sourcing Central "rules of engagement"Available at http://lichenportal.org/portal/collections/editor/crowdsource/central.phpShows scores and collections participating in crowd sourcing, along with their statistics.Available to all viewers of the site, irrespective of whether they are logged in.If users log in, then their scores will be displayed in a separated information "box".The link above will generally on most portal sites be added to the main left menu, or made available from another crowd sourcing page that is custom generated for a project. For instance, LBCC will likely link to this page from their main Drupal page.Clicking on "review records" within the Current User's Standing box will take the user to the Review page (see Appendix III).Clicking on numbers within the collection table will take the user to a list of specimens queued up for data entry (and open specimens within the CS queue).Appendix II: Collection Manager's Crowdsourcing Control PanelAvailable at http://lichenportal.org/portal/collections/editor/crowdsource/controlpanel.php?collid=22 Available only to collection managers.Shows statistics only for a given collection.Available also from the collections control panel (not yet implemented in the public site) and in Crowd Sourcing Central (via the editing symbol to the right of the collection names).Allows managers to edit crowd sourcing instructions or link to a training URL.A link to the right of "Available to Add" is where a collection manager would add their records to the Crowdsourcing queue.Appendix III: Review Pages for contributors, managersAvailable from a collection manager's perspective or a user's perspective, yet behaves somewhat differently depending on the perspective.Collection manager perspective:Main purpose is to enable a quick review of specimen records that are pending (or re-review of closed records).Available from the Collection Managers Crowdsourcing Control Panel by clicking on the "Review" link to the right of the numbers.A collection manager can assign points to an annotated record (2 points is the default value), comment, and change the CS status to closed (approved).Managers can edit all records, whether they are pending or closed.User perspective:Available from Crowd Sourcing Central by clicking on "Review Records" within the Current standing box.Allows user to review and access records with pending status.Allows user to review points and provide comments for closed records.Users can edit all pending records.Users can review yet not edit records that have been closed by a collection manager.