SensorThings API Standards Working Group proposes work on new Citizen Science extension; public comment sought on updated charter

The update adds a new task for the SWG – to create a new SensorThings API - Plus Extension (STAplus) based on the upcoming 21-068 OGC Best Practice for using Sensor Things API with Citizen Science. Comments are due by September 2, 2022.

The motivation for the Citizen-Science-focused STAplus extension was born during the EC H2020 project, Cos4Cloud. Whereas the dominant use of the OGC SensorThings data model (and API) can be coined with the use-case “single authority provides sensor readings to consumers,” in Citizen Science there are many contributors (the citizens) that together create the “big picture” with their observations.

The introduced STAplus extension supports a model where the observations are owned by (different) users that may each express the license for re-use; this part of the contribution is called the “ownership concept.” In addition to the ownership and license abilities, the introduced extension allows the expression of explicit relations between observations and the creation of group(s) of observations to containerize observations that belong together. Relations can be created among any individual observations or observations of a group to support performant Linked Data extraction and semantic queries, e.g. expressed in SPARQL.