Data handling

You can download the spots of your project as CSV or connect your webservices via API in realtime.

Your project data is always available for you. We offer high quality data standards for all projects, running on the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform on a distributed server environment for high performance and stability.

Data maintenance

In the secure project's administration tool, all project administrators can access all the submission by the users. We provide an easy-to-use interface to publish / unpublish, trash or change single entries in a Citizen Science project's data set in realtime. All spots are presented with images, categories and user information. Various sort options are available to browse or search the data.

All user comments in your Citizen Science apps (more information @ Feature: Comments) are also available in their own section for community management with tools for instant disabling / enabling comments at your disposal.

Data storage

All submitted entries in Citizen Science projects, running on the SPOTTERON platform are stored in our secure server cloud, which provides a stable and high performance for all apps through a scaleable server environment. Every access is encrypted by state-of-the-art SSL/TLS for high security. Backup routines are in place to protect against data loss.

Data export

As a logged in project administrator, you can always download a complete set of all observations at any time in the administration interface. Furthermore, the data can be filtered live by all available data fields like categories, attributes and additional information. Our export standard format is CSV, ensuring how compatibility with external tools, from commercial software to open source. In addition we can provide API access for your project for a yearly maintenance fee, which enables a customized and automatic data exchange with other webservices and your own IT tools.

As a secondary data export, we can provide user account information for those users, who have agreed e.g. to receive your newsletter at the first start of the apps for compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This customizable solution can be tailored to your project needs for adding your own custom text to the agreement dialog form.

Example CSV data export screenshot

CitizenScience ExportData Example

Licences

In compliance with the EU GDPR and the included "right to forget", all media content on the SPOTTERON platform is licensed as Creative Commons Zero (CC:0), which allows us to keep your scientific data complete while still being able to allow users to delete all their personal data and anonymize all their contributions directly within the Citizen Science app's setting panel.

Regarding Open Data we support projects which want to publish their submissions publicly. The exports of the collected data set without user infos contains all non-sensitive database tables and can be distributed online by the project and the licence you have chosen for your Citizen Science project itself can be displayed and included in the project's information panel. The data set of an Open Data Citizen Science project can additionally be made available for the public as instant download in the interactive Map (Web-App). A licence agreement dialog along with a confirmation button is shown to all users who want to download the data set.

Data Migration

For already running Citizen Science projects which want to migrate to the SPOTTERON platfrom, we offer a free data import of all their observations into the new apps.We can also import user accounts, if the users have given their consent prior to the process.